Director: Miguel Gomes
Cast: Goncalo Waddington, Crista Alfaiate, Claudio da Silva, Lang Khe Tran, Jorge Andrade, Joao Pedro Vaz, Joao Pedro Benard, Teresa Madruga, Joana Barcia
Rating: (M)
★★★+
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour (Rialto) begins in Rangoon, 1918, where Edward is awaiting his fiancee, Molly. The two are to be wed in the Burmese capital, which is under British colonial occupation. Things soon turn sour and following a tricky conversation with a relative of Molly’s, Edward impulsively flees to Singapore, setting in motion a hopscotching tour across East Asia — an ephemeral odyssey told in two parts.
Each hour of the travelogue concerns one or the other of the couple — first with Edward, sad and scared, fleeing commitment; second with Molly, the determined bride-to-be tracing his footsteps.
The simple narrative content of the film is far from its strongest element. Gomes innovates in film form in myriad ways, interweaving fiction and documentary, language and temporalities, artifice and reality.
East Asia’s cultural richness becomes the tapestry against which the White middle-class Brits (although speaking director Gomes’ native Portuguese) stage their trivial social squabbles — a parable analogising the subtextual colonial imagination that weighs on the early 20th century setting.
The stylish 16mm film coalesces with documentary footage from the director’s own travels — present-day and non-fiction — enriching the tropical soundstages on which the fiction plays out.
Voiceover directs the abstract story, told in the local dialect of the country our protagonists presently occupy, as if their tale were folklore.
