Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024).
Grand Tour (2024), director Miguel Gomes’s sixth feature and first to play in competition at Cannes, is a return to the globe-trotting style of his pre-pandemic work. In this follow-up to his remarkably resourceful COVID comedy The Tsugua Diaries (2021), which he codirected with his wife and frequent collaborator Maureen Fazendeiro, the Portuguese filmmaker exhibits an equal but opposite kind of inventiveness as he turns a two-page passage from W. Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour, a 1930 collection of the English author’s travel writing, into a peripatetic odyssey across Southeast Asia.
In 1918, Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a civil servant for the British government, spontaneously flees Rangoon the day his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), arrives to be married. As Edward sets off by boat to Singapore, and from there to Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, and Shanghai, telegrams from Molly inexplicably arriving all the while, the story blossoms into a surreal, two-part take on the screwball comedy. For the first hour, we follow Edward on his cowardly, occasionally treacherous quest to outrun his nuptials. For the second, we trace the same journey from Molly’s more rose-colored perspective—a discrete structure that allows for playful contrasts in tone and intrigue.
As in his earlier Tabu (2012) and Arabian Nights (2015), Gomes tells this tale of unrequited love through a casual mix of forms and traditions. Shot in black and white, the fictional scenes were filmed on a soundstage in Lisbon, following a pair of trips (the second of which Gomes was forced to oversee remotely due to COVID) to capture color documentary footage of the countries visited by Edward and Molly. Throughout, Gomes casually integrates the two modes, alternating between images of everyday life in these far-flung locations and the starkly artificial world of the narrative, which looks and operates something like a Frank Capra fable directed by Josef von Sternberg. The result is a film that nimbly traverses time, space, and the cinematic unconscious, calling less on the viewer’s knowledge than their imagination to reconcile its many allusions and anachronisms.
Shortly before Gomes won the Best Director prize at Cannes, we met to discuss the film’s unique production process, its multivalent construction, and his approach to capturing grace through cinema.
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Was the idea to shoot the fictional portions of Grand Tour in a studio dictated by the pandemic, or was that part of the original conception?
MIGUEL GOMES: We were delayed by the pandemic, but it had no impact on the shape of the film. I got the idea for the story from a book by Somerset Maugham. It’s not a novel, but a kind of travelogue about this trip through Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma. And there’s a moment where he’s traveling through Burma and he meets a British guy working in public administration who’s been engaged to a woman in London for a long time, but when she arrives in Burma, he panics and runs away—and she goes after him. So every time he arrives in a new country he receives a telegram from her; she’s guessing where he will go next, and there’s always a telegram waiting for him saying that she’s arriving. I don’t think this is a true story. For me it’s a joke about men being cowards in the middle of a travel book.
NOTEBOOK: What’s the rest of the book about?
GOMES: It’s just a description of his journey. It’s about temples, the people he encounters, descriptions of the markets and cities. This one situation established the departing point for the film, but the whole book gave me the desire to make a travelogue, or a filmic journal. There was a trend in the early twentieth century among rich Europeans to travel east from somewhere in the British Empire—Mumbai, Calcutta, or, as in the film, Burma—until they reached China. It was called the Asian Grand Tour. So I went to my producer, Filipa Reis, and told her I had a strange proposal that she might not like. I told her that I want to make a film about a groom who runs away from his bride—a classical situation— but before writing the script I want to go on the same journey across East Asia that the characters will go on. And I want to take my director of photography, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, as well as the people who will write the screenplay, with me. This in order to inspire the script, but also to construct an archive of images and sounds that will play a very important role in the film. Because the rest of the film, the part with the characters, will be shot in a studio—at the other end of the spectrum of cinema. With a camera, shooting in 16mm, we will discover this route through Asia and we will react to this footage through fiction. And Filipa, to her credit, said “Okay,” as if it were a normal proposal.
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Were there specific things or situations you were hoping to capture as you traveled through each country?
GOMES: We employed the joy criterion, or the fun criterion, which is I’ll have fun filming a hand-operated ferris wheel, to give one example. We did research a little about every country to locate things that might be fun to shoot, but we knew that one of the exciting things about having this material was that, in the context of a fiction, if you cut from a fishing boat in Thailand to characters in the studio to motorbikers in Vietnam, it can create resonances with the characters—in the sense that perhaps their inner lives are connected with these images. We tried to capture different moods—darkness, stress, melancholy, et cetera—in order to have things to play with in the fictional story. If we’re creating a colonial world in the studio that looks like a Hollywood film from the ’40s, and cutting, for instance, to a post office in Saigon, it creates a sensation related to how certain things change. We didn’t want to hide these changes, so we sought out things to shoot in the travelogue footage that are not of our time, and included similar but opposite details—like cell phones—in the period portion of the film. We took a chance that the continuity and flow of the film would work even with these anachronisms. If I succeeded, it’s because I wanted to prove that throughout the history of cinema we’ve spent too much money trying to make the viewer believe in things that they’re already capable of believing so long as they accept the pact of fiction. The viewer knows what they’re seeing is not 1918. The characters are in a studio, and they have the phones and cars of today. But they’ll go along with it. For me, the basic principle of fiction is accepting the idea of being in another world with a different set of rules. And you want to believe, because you want to travel.
NOTEBOOK: Did you ever consider crosscutting between the two stories, or did you always plan on telling Edward’s part first, and then restarting with Molly?
GOMES: It was always how you see in the film, which is interesting for me because the film deals with very separate things: cinema and reality. It’s up to the viewer to blend the images, to react, to create the continuity. The material is obviously different, but it’s there for you to unite based on your desire to believe what’s happening. So it was important for it not to have a portion centered on Edward, followed by a little bit of Molly. Yes, that would be the classical way to do a film like this, but it was more interesting for me to follow the man for one half of the film and then the woman for the second half, because not only does the point of view change, but also the sexes. In the first half of the film, the character knows more than the viewer, because at that point you don’t know who Molly is, or what she’s like. Is she the ugliest or most annoying person in the world? She’s an abstract figure. And then when we restart the film with Molly, we know more than her. It puts us in a completely different position. Classical cinema played a lot with these kinds of things, putting the viewer in a position where they know more than the character, so they anticipate what’s going to happen. I think it’s great to make that switch in the middle of the film, to put the viewer in a different position based on the information they have and the character does not.
NOTEBOOK: I’m sure people have told you that Jia Zhangke’s new film, Caught by the Tides [2024], has a similar story to your film?
GOMES: Yeah. We both even shot at the Yangtze River, where Jia’s Still Life [2006] was set. There seem to be many similarities between the films.
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: You mention in your director’s statement that you were influenced by screwball comedies, and you can definitely see that in the tone of the film, particularly in the Molly portion. But I’m curious what films or filmmakers you were thinking about visually for the studio segments? The director that came to my mind during those parts was Josef von Sternberg.
GOMES: I think Sternberg is probably a little more fetishistic than myself, but yes, he was a total master of studio shooting, so it was impossible not to think about him—and particularly his films set in Asia—when we entered the studio. It’s a bit like [F. W.] Murnau was with Tabu, which was a film where I took some of his film’s structure—“Paradise” and “Paradise Lost”—and was more literal with it. But here, shooting in a studio, Sternberg was impossible to escape. He was a bit like a ghost.
NOTEBOOK: Did you enjoy the confines of shooting in a studio?
GOMES: I normally shoot outside of a studio, and one of the things I like about that is the real-life aspect of it, and not having control. Sometimes people pass by and look at the camera; sometimes I get lucky with this and sometimes it messes up the shot. But it’s a game. I have to accept it. I like when noncontrolled life appears in front of the camera. In this case there was no sunlight—we had to invent light in the studio. It was completely different than what I’m used to. I was a little worried. I thought to myself, I don’t know if I like this situation. So I told my crew, “Don’t expect me to tell you everything we’re going to do ahead of time just because we’re in a studio. Because I will change my mind. It’s useless.” My only rule was to not work extra hours—to finish on time. But within that time to allow myself to discover with the actors and technicians what we can shoot in a studio. It was amazing to create a world from zero with the art directors and with Rui Poças, the cinematographer for the studio scenes.
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Had you already started to work through the documentary material by the time the studio shoot started?
GOMES: Completely. In fact, we had shot all that material before we had even started to finance the rest of the film. In the script, we had, like, “Scene One—Cut To: Ferris Wheel in Burma,” and there was a link you could click that would open a video of the ferris wheel footage. So it was a script made up of half images, half words, which were the scenes to be shot in the studio.
NOTEBOOK: Can you talk about how the scenarios for the fictional portions of the film took shape, and how, if at all, the process of working with multiple screenwriters has changed for you over the years?
GOMES: I’ve been working with Mariana Ricardo since Our Beloved Month of August [2008] and Telmo Churro since Tabu. Maureen [Fazendeiro] is the most recent acquisition. So we are four at this moment. Since Telmo is also my editor, we are able to write and then work on the edit together. It’s an organic process. Similar to what we did in Tabu and Arabian Nights, we wrote the voice-over as we edited. Sometimes writing comes at the end of the process like this. It’s all very connected.
NOTEBOOK: When did you come to the idea to have the voice-over be in multiple languages?
GOMES: That was a late decision at the end of the editing. In cinema sometimes things happen for very practical reasons, and other times for very silly reasons. One night we were working on writing and recording the voice-over in the editing room at Filipa’s office, and we were bringing in different people from the office to record each part—men and women, but all in Portuguese. It was Telmo’s idea to switch things up, starting with Maureen, who’s French, so she speaks Portuguese with a French accent, which he likes. And he said, “Maybe we should have more accents,” which eventually evolved into the idea to change languages as the characters pass through each country. So the idea for the film became twofold: a trip through the countries and a trip through the languages. And we quickly realized that there’s something to this idea that ties into one of the film’s themes, which is that cinema is like a more complex form of a puppet show. In this film we have puppets, Molly and Edward. And we also have puppet masters, the people telling the story.
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Can you talk about the idea to use puppet shows as a motif in the film?
GOMES: I guess the film has something to do with storytelling, and the process of storytelling. We understood that in Vietnam, Japan, Burma—in every country—they have different puppets and use very different techniques. So we thought, let’s shoot this: we’ll have lots of diversity and very different situations in every country, but we’ll also be able to see how these traditional forms of storytelling play off our puppets. The end of the film has to do with this as well. On the one hand, puppets are artificial creatures that only exist inside man-made spectacles like cinema. But on the other hand, puppets can live, die, and be reborn through these traditions.
NOTEBOOK: I’m curious if you have any thoughts on the idea of cultural tourism? Instead of avoiding the issue, you seemed to have responded to it by making a literal tourist film.
GOMES: I guess so. I don’t feel any culpability inside me about this. I think the world is beautiful. It’s full of grace. I don’t have to be Vietnamese to film in Vietnam. I just have to try and capture that grace and share it with the world. All these other arguments, I don’t relate. I can relate intellectually, but as a filmmaker I think we can shoot in every country—we can shoot on the moon. It’s all about you and the world—no one has exclusivity. There’s no copyright for the grace of the world.
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: The last time we spoke, you and Maureen described Grand Tour differently. You said it was “a strange love story,” and she said it was “a beautiful love story”—to which you responded, “Let’s make it first, and then we’ll see if it’s a love story.” I’m wondering what it is for you now?
GOMES: I would say it’s a film about faith. There’s this obsessed woman who has too much faith in her fiancé. And there’s this very scared man who has no faith in her. And then there’s the viewer, who has to have faith in order to enter this artificial world and take the trip with them. It’s wonderful to give viewers the freedom to decide if they want to believe in a film, even if it’s a little absurd.
NOTEBOOK: I know your film Savagery [a long-in-the-works adaptation of Euclides da Cunha’s 1902 novel Os sertões] has been delayed a number of times in recent years. What’s the latest on it?
GOMES: I’m restarting it. I tried to do it as Edward, and now I’ll try to do it as Molly. By the end I’ll achieve it.