Critics reviews

Exquisite period images, shot in 16mm monochrome, are punctuated by contemporary Asian tableaux of karaoke, bustling markets and a man-powered Ferris wheel... Gomes... playfully collapses the time periods... It is a film of many enchantments.

While the make-up of Grand Tour requires some getting used to, the film has no shortage of things to offer. Speaking to viewers in equal measures as a travel memoir and a love story, Gomes’s latest work first and foremost employs a grand exploration of the elusive.

[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.

Viewers looking for a tidy narrative and gratifying conclusions will come up short with this movie. But if you can roll with atmospherics that are their own reason for being, “Grand Tour” has plenty, and they’re all beautifully realized.

He [Gomes] drives his ideas home by periodically cutting in footage of performances — marionettes, karaoke, puppetry. These cultural shows urge the audience to consider how we relate to entertainment, to grapple with what engages us and why. Beauty is pleasurable, but the film’s use of evocative visuals to focus on storytelling more broadly is what makes it a quiet knockout.

In this seductive travelogue, we are not always sure where (or when) we are, but Gomes’ pointedly anti-love story transfixes because of its playful audacity. “Grand Tour” is an enveloping drama that’s far more than the sum of its parts — except the parts are pretty wonderful on their own, too.

Gomes may seem incapable of showing-not-telling a story in the mainstream way, thank God. But, Scheherazade-like, his entire mojo resides almost entirely within the opiate swoon of storytelling, nonstop and preposterous and often stone-cold real, just to stay alive.

Grand Tour works similarly to Gomes’ previous diptych of colonialism, Tabu, where the present’s realism betrays the past’s romanticism. By problematizing his own perspective, it could seem like Gomes is having his cake and eating it too, but it also goes a step further... Gomes picks apart an imagined past by experiencing its present, at the same time sharply unpacking the screwball comedy by separating the running man and the pursuing woman.

Much like a dream, Grand Tour works better as an impressionistic thought experiment than as a fully rounded narrative. While evocative in their own right, Gomes’s lengthy detours into present-day Singapore, Manila, Osaka et al. contribute to the film’s treacherously languid pace, and at times feel like a distraction from Edward and Molly – a central storyline pointed and compelling enough as is without the need for quite so much thematic cushioning.

It doesn’t always make sense, but that’s part of its appeal – the way it carries you along like a benevolent sleep paralysis demon forces you to surrender to the beauty. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s incredible cinematography does a lot of the heavy lifting there, despite the film feeling a bit long towards the end.

With the beautiful cinematography, solid performances from the cast of the fictionalized elements, and some rich imagery from the non-fictional ones, Grand Tour is a stylishly admirable movie at the very least. However, any attempts at a compelling core narrative are lost through the lack of emphasis on Edward and Molly's stories and an overemphasis on the trips to these locales. The film does show that Gomes is capable of making an authentic period piece and a stunning documentary, but the attempt of trying to do both at the same time has led to an unusual experiment that will leave one scratching their head.

Grand Tour has a steady and deliberate pace, but as the viewer becomes familiar with Gomes’ modus operandi, the promise of surprises along this journey starts to lessen. That’s not to say Gomes runs out of ideas (Far from it; the film ends on a most unlikely needle drop), but a tighter edit might not have hurt.