In “Grand Tour,” a lush, melancholy story of yearning, a man treks across Asia in flight from his fiancée. But this one-sentence plotline barely scratches the surface of the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s magnificent black-and-white film, which mixes mannered studio footage with fluid documentary images to build a world that doesn’t abide by traditional rules of time, space or scale.
It’s 1917, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a colonial official working for the British who is stationed in Burma, is awaiting the arrival of his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate). Conflicted about the relationship, he abandons his bird of paradise bouquet and embarks on a jagged journey across the continent. As he traverses city and jungle, Molly scrambles behind, sending him telegrams as she follows his every move.
Shot on soundstages during the pandemic, these narrative sequences evoke the refined grandeur of classic Hollywood epics. Cloaking the screen in moody chiaroscuro, Gomes finds mystique in Edward’s stoicism and poetry in Molly’s heartbreak. But “Grand Tour” also complicates this splendor. In pairing scenes of the couple with present-day footage from South and East Asia, Gomes gestures at a troubling history of cinematic distortions.
He drives his ideas home by periodically cutting in footage of performances — marionettes, karaoke, puppetry. These cultural shows urge the audience to consider how we relate to entertainment, to grapple with what engages us and why. Beauty is pleasurable, but the film’s use of evocative visuals to focus on storytelling more broadly is what makes it a quiet knockout.
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