“Grand Tour,” the latest film from Portugal’s Miguel Gomes, is stuck in the past, beautifully so, and yet, the present keeps creeping in, insisting on making itself heard. But where other directors might look backward to luxuriate into nostalgia — whether out of fondness for a bygone era or an antiquated style of filmmaking — the director of “Tabu” and “Arabian Nights” questions the very notion of what we call “the past,” crafting a story in which time periods overlap hypnotically.
In this seductive travelogue, we are not always sure where (or when) we are, but Gomes’ pointedly anti-love story transfixes because of its playful audacity. “Grand Tour” is an enveloping drama that’s far more than the sum of its parts — except the parts are pretty wonderful on their own, too.
It is January 1918, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), an unremarkable civil servant for the British Empire, is on the run. On the eve of marrying Molly (Crista Alfaiate), his fiancée whom he hasn’t seen in seven years, Edward gets cold feet, fleeing Rangoon to escape his beloved. The film’s first hour focuses on his restless getaway — on train and by boat, from Singapore to Saigon to Shanghai — while the second hour pivots to Molly’s far more lighthearted tracking of Edward, her screwball-comedy cackle just one element of Gomes’ movie that feels consciously antiquated. Filmed in silvery black-and-white, shot on sound stages and acted with a knowing theatricality, “Grand Tour” plays like a lost early talkie that’s been rescued from some dusty vault.
But from the movie’s first frames, Gomes keeps interrupting his tale, allowing the messy vitality of modern life to flood the narrative. Contemporary documentary footage of different puppet shows across Asia are interspersed with vivid street scenes that offer a present-day glimpse of the locations where Edward and Molly’s romantic misadventures unspool. The film’s mix of offscreen speakers often provides context for what’s happening in the 1918 story when we see modern images that correspond to the action described. (For instance, during a moment in which Edward wanders into a Japanese noodle restaurant, Gomes shows documentary footage of a current one.)
The initially jarring juxtaposition of then and now — fiction and documentary — quickly becomes intoxicating, inviting the viewer to both contemplate the ceaseless passage of time and ponder the seamless temporal transitions. Slyly, the device repeatedly undercuts the supposed importance of Edward and Molly’s parallel odysseys. From our contemporary vantage point, their minuscule existences have been erased, replaced by the modern-day footage’s bustle of traffic and clatter of the everyday.
Similarly, the British’s colonial control of the region is now a thing of the past. Even those in Edward’s orbit sense the winds of change.
“The end of the empire is inevitable,” he’s warned. “It’s a matter of years, maybe months. We will leave without having understood a thing.”
The film’s genesis was accidental, Gomes inspired by a brief passage in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1935 collection of travel writing, “The Gentleman in the Parlour,” in which the author recounts a story he heard about an Englishman trying to back out of his imminent wedding, traveling across Asia to stay a step ahead of his bride-to-be. (Amusingly, Gomes himself was about to marry when he read the book.) But rather than first write Edward and Molly’s plot line, Gomes and his creative team retraced the steps of this Englishman — even if the tale was probably apocryphal — filming what they encountered along the way with the help of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, a frequent cinematographer for Luca Guadagnino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. After studying the documentary footage, all of it transporting without exoticizing the locales, Gomes and his cowriters penned the period tale based around that visual material.
The result is a movie in which the 20th century and the 21st century continually talk to each other. Sometimes, the two eras bleed into one, making it nearly impossible to know whether we’re witnessing past or present. (After three viewings, I am not entirely convinced that a ringing cellphone in one scene is contemporary or, rather, a coy anachronistic joke incorporated into a 1918 segment.) This temporal blending, far from being a coldly experimental exercise, immerses us in the pure pleasure of storytelling, as light and free as those magical puppet shows Gomes occasionally returns to.
As performers, Waddington and Alfaiate are less timeless than than they are out of time, bringing soul and shading to silent-movie archetypes of the timid man and his brassy gal. Impressively, “Grand Tour” illuminates the artificiality of its trappings while honoring them, tapping into our collective acceptance of the “reality” of cinema’s unreality. The characters’ dilemma may, ultimately, be meaningless set against the ebbs and flows of history, but Gomes, who won the directing prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, invests it with such elegance that it becomes nearly mythic: a touching fable of cowardice and devotion with tragic undertones. The scenes may be dreamlike, but they’re our shared dream of being swept away by the movies.
Sporadically, Gomes goes even further to remind us that everything we’re watching is a construction. (A brief breaking of the fourth wall near the end of the film is stunning.) But as intellectually stimulating as “Grand Tour” is, the film registers fully as an emotional, ecstatic experience. It’s also a gas. Few filmmakers would be ballsy enough to swipe one of cinema’s most famous — and parodied — pieces of music, Strauss’ “Blue Danube” waltz, forever synonymous with “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and find a fresh, poetic use for it. Here, the music scores an extraordinary montage that includes a lavish ball in 1918, the exploits of a fishing boat and a fleet of mopeds cruising in slow motion. Throughout “Grand Tour,” then and now are joined in a glorious dance, creating something vibrantly new out of remnants of the past — gone but not forgotten.
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