The spirit of “Sans Soleil” casts a long shadow over Miguel Gomes’ beguiling “Grand Tour,” a less essayistic but similarly atemporal travelogue that sometimes feels almost as indebted to Chris Marker as Gomes’ “Tabu” was to F.W. Murnau. Much like Marker’s 1983 masterpiece, Gomes’ film is propelled by the mysterious frisson that it creates between “exotic” documentary footage and disembodied narration. And much like “Sans Soleil,” “Grand Tour” uses that non-stop voiceover to shape its accompanying images into an abstract story about the elusive relationship between time and memory.
In this case, that story is a love story (of sorts), one that again finds Gomes harkening back to the kind of blinkered colonial romances that were so prevalent in the silent era and the early days of Hollywood. And since a love story requires a tactile anchor for its yearning, Gomes — in stark contrast to Marker — cast a pair of conventionally attractive actors to embody the characters described over the soundtrack.
The first of those characters is Edward (a hollowed but ruggedly handsome Gonçalo Waddington), a civil servant for the British Empire. We meet him in Burma towards the end of 1917, where he receives a telegram from the fiancée he hasn’t seen in seven years; it’s finally time for them to tie the knot, and she’ll be in Rangoon by tomorrow. Edward impulsively decides to make sure that he’s gone before she gets there, and hops the next train going anywhere. It derails, but he emerges from the wreckage with a smile on his face. “What a beautiful morning,” he sighs, happily liberated from the chokehold of a history that he managed to escape in the nick of time.
From there, Edward travels through a variety of other countries on a path that wends its way through the streets of Hanoi, the mountains of Japan, and up the Yangtze River in China among other points of interest. Waddington, however, never appears to leave the confines of the period-appropriate Portuguese soundstage where his scenes were shot, as the brunt of his character’s journey was lensed in the first-person between 2020 and 2022.
No effort is made to obscure the recency of that footage, even though Gomes — who was forced to direct much of it remotely because of the pandemic — smoothes out the anachronisms between his two modes by shooting them in the same ravishing 16mm monochrome he previously used in “Tabu.” This mixture of studio footage and canned exteriors reflects the construction of the classic Hollywood romances that “Grand Tour” sometimes resembles, but the effect deliberately runs counter to that overlap, drawing more attention to the disconnect between Western cinema’s idea of “the orient” and the reality of how life appears in those same countries today.
Alas, Edward is neither aware of nor interested in thinking about the poetics of his condition. Growing sourer and more despondent by the minute, the runaway groom fails to appreciate the irony of being guided by a man with three wives, or the splendor of the New Year’s Eve fireworks display he sees in Saigon (Gomes naturally cuts to modern footage of the same event in full color, which is more spectacular but less exciting). To make matters worse, a chipper and undaunted new letter from his fiancée seems to be waiting for him wherever he goes. “Grand Tour” denies us any significant insight into its characters’ minds, lest they threaten to overshadow the film’s concepts, but a man can only read “STOP” on a telegram so many times before he starts to appreciate its double meaning.
Enter: Molly. The second hour of Gomes’ characteristically recursive film ditches Edward in favor of his fiancée (a blithe and buoyant Crista Alfaiate), following Molly as she tenaciously retraces her paramour’s footsteps, suffers through several laughing fits, and fends off the advances of a bearded gentleman who’s willing to marry her right then and there. She’s as giddy as Edward is dejected, which tracks across a medium that’s usually been happier while pursuing the past than it has been while escaping from it — or trying to, at least.
And that is essentially the full extent to which Gomes is willing to explore Molly’s emotions, as “Grand Tour” resists any temptation to create a sentimental connection between his characters, or to use them as conduits for the emotional reaction their story is perversely well-designed to evoke. Indifferent to the nuances of Molly and Edward’s feelings, the movie turns its attention instead on the sights that its would-be lovers are too laser-focused to enjoy. An adorable mini horse in Burma. A very literal twist on carpool karaoke in Manilla. The hum of traffic everywhere.
The pull of time causes a kind of tunnel vision, echoing the irises that Gomes uses to frame Edward’s plight at the start of the film. At one point, a Vietnamese friend named Ngoc brings Molly to a psychic, who frustrates our heroine by revealing her actual future. When “Grand Tour” finally arrives at its twistiest moment of meta self-reflection, it almost seems as if Gomes — whose films always reflect his free-wheeling approach to their construction — is punishing his characters for their very different but equally strong allegiances to a predetermined choice.
In a film where “almost seems” is about as concrete as things get, grasping at those kind of straws can feel relatively productive, but for all the luminous beauty of its images, “Grand Tour” sorely lacks a current strong enough to sustain the thoughts that flow between them, compelling as some of those thoughts may be. That, more than anything else, proves to be its most significant point of departure from “Sans Soleil,” which resonates with a bottomless well of feeling despite the even greater abstractions of its form.
“Who said that time heals all wounds?,” Marker’s narrator once asked. “It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds.” Gomes’ film is no more sensitive to the lasting scars of its landscapes than it is to the newer pains of the characters it follows through them, but it nevertheless alights upon a textured — and occasionally even spellbinding — way to retrace the relationship between distance and understanding for a world that would sooner run away from the past than reckon with our conception of it.
Grade: B-
“Grand Tour” premiered in Competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
