The (a)historical fiction of Grand Tour
A train crashes in the jungle. Just as steam bellows out of the upended carriage, Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a white man in a thin linen suit, climbs out as well. Despite being in a dense rainforest, the sight of a westerner is not a spectacle to behold in this part of the world, in this part of history of Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour. After he settles on his feet, he looks up towards the horizon, beyond the swaying trees, and says “what a beautiful morning.” An artificial light shines on his bespectacled face, and a smile glimmers.
This white man, an English consul in Rangoon, is what the first half of the film follows around, on the run from his fiancée of seven years Molly (Crista Alfaiate) around various exotic Asian countries, from south to north. Or, more accurately, Edward seems to be pushed around by the force of the film. For although he is the protagonist of the first part of this epic, his passivity and introversion seem to be what the metaphysical forces of Grand Tour are preying on as an excuse to embark on the journey. The second half of the film flips the perspective and restarts from the beginning. It is now Molly that the camera follows, as she retraces her fiancé’s erratic, but ultimately grand, tour through Burma, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Japan, and China.
Part travelogue, part fantasia, Grand Tour flips the exotic travel film on its head. Effectively, the film points to the constructed nature of history, and departs from there. Inspired by the 1930 book The Gentleman in the Parlour by English author W. Somerset Maugham, Gomes and his crew documented the sights and sounds of their travels along the exact route of the characters. Its script was also written only after Gomes and his three other screenwriters had been to all of the countries. In effect this process culminated in an archive of the present.
On the other hand, Grand Tour refuses to buy into the fictions of imaginary histories. Most of the black and white scenes were shot on a soundstage, shrouded in a haze of artificiality. The archive, no longer a reputable source of what once was, instead becomes ephemeral. The past and the present co-exists and overlap, but importantly the countries do not. The chimeric voice-over that takes on the language of whichever country Edward and Molly’s travels take them, renders each and every one of their destinations stratified.
Like Antiterra of Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor, the magical colonial spacetime that Grand Tour constructs is nothing short of singular, and disrupts any sense of naturalism or immersion. At first, one might assume that the present and the past are delineated by the use of colour: present day in colour, and the past in black and white. As soon as the film establishes that connection, it is instantly subverted: the present is in both colour and black and white. What we assumed as the forest of the colonial past is instead the hiding place of a ringing smartphone.
Grand Tour contains many images of such befuddlement. As much as they are puzzling, they are also not short of sublime. Like the tracking shot of Edward as he is pushing through a crowded ballroom for a young Thai prince’s birthday party. The dancing crowd, the camera, and Edward weave together a rich tapestry of movement. As Gomes said in an interview, “cinema should be something that invents a space.” His film is not a declaration on the ‘correct’ approach to colonial history; it is not a classic tragic love story. It is a film that accentuates the in-between: the gap between the past and the present, between its multilingual voice-overs and its accompanying images, between Edward and Molly, between wherever you happen to be and wherever the film takes you.