GRAND TOUR
Grand Tour, or the romantic escapades of a free-spirited director
Grand Tour, Portuguese director Miguel Gomes‘ sixth feature film and first in Competition, is the result of a creative process rooted in the present moment that this free-spirited film-maker has become known for.
Grand Tour was sparked by Miguel Gomes’ vision of weaving a narrative path through a five-week trip across South-East Asia that he embarked on in early 2020, 16 mm camera in hand, on a quest to shape the found footage he might use for the characters in his work in progress.
His plans screeched to a halt with the pandemic, the film-maker forced to shape his film remotely with help from a technical crew (overseen from Portugal) tasked with finishing off the filming he had earmarked for the aborted trip.
This sixth feature film was a feat for the Portuguese director who has tirelessly reinvented himself since he first started, wandering off the beaten path and veering away from pre-defined creative processes on a mission to craft his own art: pivoting live, as and when the unexpected arises.
The black-and-white film tells the tale of Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant stationed in Rangoon in Burma in 1917, who decides to jump ship on the day he is due to marry Molly (Crista Alfaiate) to embark on a ‘grand tour’ of Asia. Determined to get married, Molly sets off to track Edward down, following in his footsteps across the continent.
Far from light-filled bamboo forests, Thai jungles and snow-capped Japanese temples, Miguel Gomes finally struck gold in the studio for Grand Tour, where the magic of Asia was recreated with no digital trickery needed.
This was a chapter that serves as a reminder of Gomes’ abilities as a free-spirited, present-led director, who had already brought Cannes the super-sized Arabian Nights fresco and its over six hours of film back in 2015.
Drawing parallels between the narrative’s real time recreated in the studio, and the window of time when the footage was shot directly in situ during his travels, the Portuguese director explains how he was striving to create a sense of cinematographic time that exists outside of time itself. In any case, with Grand Tour, he serves up a romantic escapade perfectly aligned with his signature unconventional style.
