Film Review: ‘Grand Tour’ Has Striking Images with Limited Purpose

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie that simultaneously wants to be too many things at the same time and can’t find its own identity amidst the sea of filmmakers (and films) it’s referencing from. This, however, was the prevalent feeling while watching Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes’ latest movie, which was highly lauded during its world premiere at Cannes, ultimately winning the Best Director award at last year’s edition of the festival. 

It’s not hard to see why so many people are eating it up. The film is a dense piece of work that surprisingly blends many filmmaking techniques to great effect: old-school studio photography filled with scenes clearly shot on a soundstage to recreate the prevalent mode of blockbuster filmmaking in the 1940s and ‘50s, experimental associations with the black-and-white soundstage photography to present-day color sequences meant to look like 16mm archives from a long-lost period, until some scenes set in the modern era (notably COVID) are also shot in black-and-white. This is but one of many approaches Gomes has in store in his 128 minutes, all the while adopting a structure that seems to tip the hat to the work of Frederico Fellini, Wim Wenders, Chris Marker, Godfrey Reggio, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. 

It’s unsurprising, then, that Gomes would team up with Weerasethakul’s most-known cinematography collaborator, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, to lend a hand in crafting the movie’s visual language, alongside Gui Liang and Rui Poças. It doesn’t necessarily matter who shot what because the photography is the only point of interest that makes Grand Tour worth seeking out. The film is a purely visual story in constant communication with itself, either in depicting the story of British civil servant Edward Abbot (Gonçalo Waddington) fleeing Rangoon a few days before his fiancé, Molly (Crista Alfaiate) arrives or in showcasing what the cities that Edward visits in his “Grand Tour” look like now. 

The film’s first hour immediately alienates an audience looking for more safe, hand-holding cinema, but it’s the part I enjoyed the most. Anything involving Edward is a bit dull (notably because Waddington himself doesn’t have much to work with), but everything beyond that main storyline tying its thematic underpinnings together is incredibly hypnotizing. Several montages, one of which immediately recalls Koyaanisqatsi in how it showcases a city in motion, shackled by capitalism, strike attention, especially when it superimposes one continuous image on top of another, to represent the alienation of a town going nowhere. After this specific moment, I almost didn’t want Gomes to return to Edward contemplating whether he should wed Molly because the disconnected voiceover narration describing Edward’s “Grand Tour” while showing present-day images that didn’t match what was spoken was enticing enough. The first half moves from Koyaanisqatsi to Sans Soleil instantly, until we shift gears once again with the arrival of Molly, as she looks for Edward, having learned that he has deserted her. 

For a while, the second half of the movie, now entirely focusing on Molly’s journey, bathes in some form of conventionality, with some clearly defined Fellini-esque surrealism before fully delving into more spiritually-charged images. And while the conventional aspects of the movie certainly take some time to draw a fiercely magnifying turn from Alfaiate, a frequent collaborator of Gomes, the overall result doesn’t amount to anything tangible. As the images continue to transform themselves from one half of the movie to the next, we slowly begin to realize that the inspirations Gomes takes from several filmmakers are just that: inspirations. It desperately wants to be Fellini, Wenders, and Marker simultaneously, without understanding what makes their singular styles so special or appropriating their techniques for his benefit. However, instead of finding its own identity within the auteurs’ distinct formal conceptions of cinema, Gomes puts them all in a blender and creates a discombobulated experience that results in a movie featuring plenty of incredible images, sadly devoid of any tangible meaning. 

What does it mean for him to appropriate the surrealistic imagery Fellini is most known for, even going so far as to stage a fourth-wall break to showcase the artists creating the “illusion” of cinema similar to the one the Italian filmmaker made near the end of And the Ship Sails On? Not much, other than a wink for ardent cinephiles who can extract the reference he’s showcasing. This is incredibly prevalent throughout the movie, where Gomes only celebrates his filmmaking influences without creating his distinct voice among the ones he’s citing, which is strange considering his previous efforts, Tabu and his Arabian Nights trilogy, had his own voice found in the bevy of artists he was plucking out of. Sadly, his latest approach ultimately leads to a ponderous, heavy-handed picture that puts us at arm’s length of the metaphorical storytelling and the two protagonists at the heart of his “Grand Tour.”

By the time Grand Tour reaches its narrative shift to spell out what its first part was implicitly treading on, which feels like a welcomed change of pace, one quickly realizes that Gomes is sadly going nowhere, as he continues to cite some of cinema history’s most-known figures with limited purpose. He certainly knows how to create frames that deftly resemble the feeling one gets when watching Fellini’s earlier movies, especially through its staggering black-and-white photography, but that’s the only thing you’ll remember when Grand Tour’s credits roll, a great-looking and highly imaginative visual tone poem with little to no significance around what’s being shown. Film is a visual medium, but images without substance result in an empty spectacle. 

SCORE: ★★