‘Grand Tour’ is a colonial rumination on Southeast Asia

This dynamic is baked into the movie's making too. For the production, Gomes teamed up with numerous international cinematographers: not just fellow countryman and frequent collaborator Rui Poças, but Guo Liang—who shot the movie's China scenes remotely during COVID lockdowns—and Thai maestro Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, known for his work with Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Luca Guadagnino. The film begins in early 20th Century Rangoon (known today as Yangon), the Crown-controlled former capital city of Myanmar—then Burma—where British civil servant Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) awaits the arrival of his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate). However, Edward's cold feet send him absconding across the region, taking him to Thailand, China, Japan and Vietnam, as Molly gives chase, and the two communicate by post.

This premise, however, comes to light in oblique ways, and is often introduced through contemporary color footage of each aforementioned nation. These modern images are touristic in nature, and their gaze often falls on streetside marionette and shadow puppet performances in each country, depicting various parts of their respective histories. Alongside establishing scenes from each location (filmed in color), Gomes also employs narrative voiceover in a local language, treating the story of Edward and Molly as folklore, or traveling myth.

"Grand Tour" is mostly in black and white with some color footage.

Courtesy of MUBI

When Gomes returns to his 1918 setting, these intimate, more traditional dramatic scenes are shot mostly on Portuguese and Italian sound stages. This was particularly an outcome of the pandemic, but it works to situate the story's colonial gaze far away from the real places in question. The grainy black-and-white of this persona drama contains a sense of cinematic nostalgia, born of its dreamlike celluloid haze. The film also breaks any sense of verisimilitude in these moments, providing frequent reminders to the audience that this act of colonial storytelling is, in fact, a fiction. The sets resemble scrawny paper mâché constructions. The forests are shallow and foggy. Anachronistic technology frequently appears, and the British characters all speak Portuguese, a stage-like approach that swaps one colonial language for another. And yet, the story remains alluring despite being tongue-in-cheek, owed in large part to Waddington’s and Alfaiate’s debonair performances as a screwball couple separated by time and space.

In writing the movie (alongside Telmo Churro, Mariana Ricardo and Maureen Fazendeiro), Gomes appears to have been inspired by the works of early 20th Century British scribe William Somerset Maugham, particularly The Gentleman in the Parlour, which similarly follows an Englishman in Burma, who trots from Rangoon to Haiphong to leave his fiancée behind. However, while Grand Tour may not avoid the orientalism of these writings—which tend to reduce entire people and cultures to pawns of white protagonists—it certainly subverts them, often by zeroing in on the visual and narrative corners in which they're usually forgotten. In the process, what reads like colonial re-enforcement on paper ends up deconstructing this gaze.

In the western consciousness, such stories are often wistfully framed, and Grand Tour turns that wistfulness on its head, forcing Edward into a state of transience, where his excursion across Asia becomes as much about finding new places as it is about hiding from himself, and from his own cruelty. The film is, in this way, akin to the 1965 Merchant Ivory production Shakespeare Wallah, which follows a traveling band of Indian and British actors at the tail end of the British Raj. India's liberation is undoubtedly a boon, but Shakespeare Wallah unearths the emotional complications therein, for characters so tethered to the British Empire that they know nothing else.

Through "Grand Tour," Miguel Gomes deconstructs the colonial gaze.

Courtesy of MUBI

Gomes offers a similar sympathy for white devils in Grand Tour, for whom the monolithic "Far East" is an opportunity to eat, pray and love their way to self-actualization, though they may not actually avail of this. In fact, the only moment Edward claims to feel comfortable or at home is when he reaches the shores of Japan—the only country in question that, despite being folded into the "Orient," was itself a colonial power at the time.

Without averting his camera, Gomes re-frames the cultural context of the story's "exoticism" by peering through time. His gaze lands on the cultural elements that not only overlap between these aforementioned Asian countries—usually, the ways they perpetuate their own stories and histories, through artistic performance—but the elements that greatly differ as well, starting with the languages and dialects laid atop the movie's soundtrack. The movie is as much a grand tour of oceans and lush landscapes as it is one of colonial history, and the artistic forces that have shaped the collective outlook on former colonies in the western mind.