‘Grand Tour’ Review: Miguel Gomes’ Avant-Garde Eastern Odyssey Is Not Recommended For Tourists – Cannes Film Festival

After the extraordinary triple whammy of Emelia Perez, The Substance and Anora, here comes Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes with a blast of cinematic chloroform to calm the Cannes Competition down a touch.

A talky, experimental odyssey through the far east, it deals with issues of colonialism and gender, but in such an oblique way that it’s hard to fathom without referring to the rather cryptic press notes that come with it. Fans of Gomes’s deadpan style — with which he broke out in 2012 when his film Tabu became an arthouse favorite on the festival circuit — will no doubt respond to its eccentricity, its wry irony and its undoubtedly striking monochrome cinematography. Less enlightened viewers may wish to take a pillow.

The film takes place in two timeframes. The fictional narrative takes place in 1918 and begins with British civil servant Edward Abbot (Gonçalo Waddington) arriving at Mandalay station in Burma. Although he apparently hasn’t seen his fiancée Molly Singleton (Crista Alfaiate) for seven years, Edward is drunk, wearing a groom’s outfit, and carrying a bunch of flowers. But that’s not necessarily what we see. Instead, and throughout, we mostly hear the story in voiceover, performed by a variety of unnamed narrators, male and female, from whichever country its protagonists are in at the time. It takes some getting used to, since often the footage used is from the present day, much of it showing how modern the east has become, with its traffic-heavy cities and love of karaoke.

Edward catches the midnight train to Rangoon, and then takes a ship to Singapore, where he stays at the swanky Raffles hotel and meets an old acquaintance, Timothy (Cláudio da Silva), an expat of no fixed means with an outstanding bill for 18 Singapore Slings drunk the night before. Timothy is Molly’s cousin and considers Edward to be a lucky man. He also thinks that, because of his travels, he is a spy, which Edward refuses to confirm or deny. When a telegram arrives from Molly (“ARRIVING. STOP”), Edward takes off again, this time to Bangkok, with a tour guide and his three wives.

This, effectively, is the plot, apparently inspired by a briefly mentioned anecdote in Somerset