Like an epic poem told through a multitude of voices, Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour is a movie of unorthodox sweep and diffuse grace. In following the fanciful story of two lovers journeying separately through East and Southeast Asia in the early 20th century, Gomes mixes staged scenes with documentary footage — some of it distinctly modern, some of it seemingly more timeless. The film is narrated in the languages of the cultures the characters move through, as Burmese gives way to Thai, to Vietnamese, and beyond — a wandering, collective dream.
Gomes won a richly deserved Best Director prize at Cannes for Grand Tour , which screens at the New York Film Festival this week. The Portuguese filmmaker, an art-house darling whose work tends to be both playful and uncompromising, has described the imagery of Grand Tour as evoking for him “the spectacle of the world,” which makes the picture a lovely paradox: Through the occasionally absurd and self-consciously artificial tale of two souls hopping across a continent, he has fashioned a work that inspires us to look closer at our real world and how we live in it. In the film’s first half, a handsome British colonial official stationed in Rangoon, Edward Abbot (Gonçalo Waddington), flees his unseen fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), by drifting from city to city — Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, and farther.
Anxious and uncertain, he’s not sure why he’s trying to get away from Molly. Waiting with a bouquet .