Cannes Dispatch – Grand Tour

The 77^th Cannes Film Festival turns out to be pretty backloaded as slowly but surely, bangers are starting to pile up in its second half. Today, Portuguese director Miguel Gomes presented one more bona-fide contender for the Palme d’Or in the form of Grand Tour. Playful, melancholic, formally and stylistically spellbinding, it’s an anti-love story/road movie as you’ve never seen before. A most wonderful mystery and one of the very best films of the festival.

Divided into two parts, the first half of the film tells the story of Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a diplomat stationed in Burma in 1918. Edward has been engaged to his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) for seven years but when Molly announces she’s finally coming to Burma to get married, he panics and takes off on a journey all across Asia. Determined to track down her fiancé, Molly follows Edward on his pan-Asian escape route country by country, documented in the second half of the film.

As was the case of An Unfinished Film and Caught by the Tides, Grand Tour is a mix of narrative and documentary filmmaking, done in an even dreamier way. Most of Edward and Molly’s stories are told in voiceover. Narrators would recount – in the respective local language of the characters’ current location – the  challenges they face as they journey further. Meanwhile, only a small portion of the narrated events is acted out. The majority of the film consists of candid footage shot in the countries of the couple’s travels, footage which depicts people and situations (from today) not directly related to the story being told (from 1918). When the voiceover is telling us about Edward’s recurring nightmares, we could be seeing a show of traditional Burmese puppeteering. While it is recounting his worries and anxieties after receipt of another telegram from Molly who’s hot on his trail, it may be chickens being slaughtered by Vietnamese street vendors that we’re looking at.

This mismatch between aural and visual narratives creates a dissonance that’s slightly disorienting. There’s a level of shock when you hear about Edward’s arrival in Shanghai and see images of a skyline dominated by futuristic highrises and of streetfuls of pedestrians wearing surgical masks. And there’s something funny about watching an old man deliver his rendition of “My Way” while getting updates on Edward’s troubles in Thailand from over 100 years ago. This is obviously a bold, experimental approach that could be interpreted in a million different ways; to me it immediately feels like it’s creating cinema in the language of dreams, where what you see is not necessarily what’s happening.

Interspersed among the documentary footage are scenes shot with the actors to convey the actual experiences of the two characters. These scenes, often shot on the same location twice with Waddington and then Alfaiate, primarily serve to accentuate the difference between Edward and Molly. The reluctant groom-to-be is really quite miserable. On the one hand, he can’t bear the idea of marriage after having postponed it for seven years. On the other, his reaction of fleeing from Burma to Singapore, from Japan to China, just to hide from his fiancée, is bringing him much confusion and shame. All of which makes the breezy tone of the scenes with Molly so surprising. Instead of taking the hint that her fiancé might not want to be with her anymore, the young woman is positively amused by Edward’s behavior and brushes off any discouragement from friends and family. She will find him and make him see that they belong together.

As such, there’s this interesting tonal change between the two halves of Grand Tour. While the first half feels predominantly wistful and poignant, the second half – about a woman from 1918 chasing her fiancé through multiple countries to get married – has a whiff of Wes Anderson-esque humor to it. Both Waddington and Alfaiate have limited screen time, even though they’re the leads, but they ably communicated the contrast of their characters’ personalities with two sharp, understated performances. Alfaiate is particularly endearing with a signature laugh as character trait that’s simply delightful.

Shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Rui Poças and Gui Liang, Grand Tour looks phenomenal. The mostly b&w imagery has that vintage film stock texture that’s not only gorgeous to look at, it enhances the dream-like quality of the images that makes you want to just immerse in them. Fans of Gomes’ Tabu would be glad to know that in terms of aesthetic finesse and expressive intensity, this film is very much on the level of that festival breakout from 2012.

Hypnotically strange and beautiful, Grand Tour travels across borders of time and space, fiction and documentary, reality and dream, and ends on an appropriately poetic note. It would make for a handsome, more-than-deserving Palme d’Or winner.