Rangoon, Burma, 1918. Edward, an official of the British Empire, runs away on the day he is to marry his fiancée Molly. Determined to get married, Molly sets off in search of Edward, following in the footsteps of his Grand Tour across Asia.
Winner of the “Prix de la mise en scène” at the Cannes Film Festival
“Grand Tour, a virtuoso journey through Southeast Asia, between reality and fantasy” – Télérama
“A film of love, a vertiginous merry-go-round on which the powers of cinema parade” – Cahiers du cinéma
Miguel Gomes’ filmography: Miguel Gomes (Lisbon, 1972) is a Portuguese filmmaker who graduated from Lisbon’s Escuela Superior de Teatro y Cine. After his first short films, presented and rewarded at numerous international festivals, he directed his first feature film, LA GUEULE QUE TU MÉRITES in 2004. His subsequent films, CE CHER MOIS D’AOÛT (Directors’ Fortnight 2008), TABOU (Silver Bear – Alfred Bauer Prize and FIPRESCI Prize, Berlinale 2012), LES MILLE ET UNE NUITS (Directors’ Fortnight 2015) and JOURNAL DE TÛOA (co-directed with Maureen Fazendeiro, Directors’ Fortnight 2021) confirm his international success. Retrospectives of Miguel Gomes’ work have taken place in Austria, Italy, Spain, Germany, Greece and the United States. GRAND TOUR is his sixth feature film.
Director’s note (excerpts): In the early 20th century, the “Asian Grand Tour” was the name given to the itinerary that started in one of the great cities of the British Empire, in India, and ended in the Far East (China or Japan). Many European travellers undertook this Grand Tour, and several of them wrote books about the experience. Based on this rough idea of the fiance fleeing along this route, we decided that we had to do the Grand Tour ourselves before we started writing the script. We filmed the route in 2020, creating a “travel archive”. The writing was born of our confrontation with these images. Unlike what usually happens in archive films, these images don’t come from the past, but from the present. And the rest of the film, shot with actors in a studio in Lisbon and Rome, is the past. The action takes place in 1918. The film’s two main characters travel this vast territory for complementary reasons: Edward, the man, is fleeing his fiancée Molly; and Molly, the woman, is pursuing her fiancé Edward. He is trying to avoid, or at least delay, marriage; she is trying to marry Edward without wasting any more time. The countless twists and turns that result from the movements of each of them make up the film and reflect the virtual interaction between Edward and Molly, the symphony of a gap that arises from the irruption of the world between two individuals. As in the American screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, the woman is the hunter and the man the prey. However, the two characters are separated in space and time. The change of perspective from man to woman leads comedy to give way to melodrama. There are several Grand Tours in this film. There’s the geographical Grand Tour of contemporary Asia, corresponding to the characters’ journey through an imaginary Asia recreated in the studio. There’s the emotional Grand Tour experienced differently by Edward and Molly: both are on the move in this sentimental territory, which is no less vast than the one they physically traverse. And above all, there’s the Grand Tour that unites the separate – countries, genders, eras, the real and the imaginary, the world and cinema. It’s to this last Grand Tour that I want to invite the viewer of the film. And that, I believe, is what cinema is for.
