There we have it: in Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes gives us the defining image of his work. Our protagonist leaves a train crash, and the first thing he does—before checking if anyone is hurt—is look at the horizon and pronounce with profundity and poise: “It’s a beautiful day”… Mr. Gomes, on his part, has been proclaiming this throughout whole movies.

This one is no different. A man goes to Asia in order to marry a British woman; before she arrives, he flees. Thus starts his “grand tour” of the continent, and hers, for she’ll resolutely follow him wherever he goes, forcing him to keep on the move. In this big, endless travel, Gomes finds a schematic frame to which he can add whatever illuminates his clever mind.

So much so that everything seems interchangeable. That’s because our artist works intuitively. Free from all constraints, liberated from all classical forms, he can associate at will. He can interrupt the narrative in order to set a slowed-down shot of a street corner to classical music; all the motorcycles in perfect equilibrium do form a beautiful waltz, don’t they? Another of his favorite parlor tricks: in between traditional narrative scenes, a disembodied narration (this time in several different languages, according to the country of the moment) advances the story, while on the screen beautifully photographed shots more or less connected to each other fill our eyes with very vague, “poetic” associations.

Oh, and does he indulge himself! For two hours we sit in his chic sofa as he shows us all the most charming and—should we say it?— exotic pictures of his travel album. One could argue, of course, that they are supposed to be exotic, since he is offering us a pastiche of colonial imagery. That could very well be the case, but then why does he need to travel to Japan and hire a Japanese actor, who’ll be asked to say nothing but the most obvious orientalist clichés. Marguerite Duras knew better than to go to India, John Ford knew better than to go to China (for Seven Women, 1967). If Mr. Gomes travels in order to find that which he already knew, then perhaps he’d be better off staying at home.

Clever jokes and precious little ideas don’t make for a movie; beautiful cinematography is not a replacement for good dialogues, acting and mise-en-scène. It is not enough, in order to make a good piece of art, to simply assemble that which you already know and like, since a work of art should in the first place be a discovery.

Gomes however insists upon an idea as if he had found the Holy Grail—how many times do our protagonists need to blow raspberries, how many times does the potty-mouthed flower woman need to curse, before he is satisfied and ready to move on? Instead of working so much on effects, he should look towards building something. Instead of searching for beauty, he’d be better off searching for necessity. Once necessity is found, beauty will then come by itself.

After Diary of Country Priest (1951), Bresson famously decided he’d from now on avoid the temptation of pretty shots that serve no narrative purpose—these same shots which dominate Grand Tour. That’s not because he thought the story was more important than the image, but because he knew art is not indulgence.