Film & TV

Film Review: Grand Tour

Waiting for his fiancée in Rangoon in 1917, civil servant Edward suddenly gets cold feet, leading the loyal Molly on a chase around Asia.

Quirky, innovative, and unflaggingly engaging.
4

Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar), 1918. Edward, a civil servant working for the British Empire, is at the docks waiting for his fiancée Molly to arrive from London. Despite being engaged they haven’t seen each other for seven years. Edwards suddenly gets cold feet, and instead of greeting Molly as she disembarks from her ship, he hops on another ship and heads to wherever it is going. So begins Edward’s odyssey through Asia, with Molly mysteriously only one step behind him the whole time.

Portuguese director Miguel Gomes has taken a big risk with his current feature. Shot mostly in black and white, it yet embraces deliberate anachronisms, showing many of Edward’s ports-of-call in their contemporary guise. There is almost a sense of Gomes attempting to “tear down the fourth wall”, something which is common in theatre, but rarely done in film. The storyline itself is silly, and cutely romantic, yet serves mainly as a spine to this quirky travelogue and love letter, to Eastern Asia. Each place along the journey is defined by some form of cultural entertainment, particularly any local style of puppetry, adding a further layer of unworldliness and quaint charm. And although the film touches on colonialism, cultural appropriation, and racism, it does so with lightness.

Gonçalo Waddington is delightful as Edward. As Molly, Crista Alfaiate is charm galore, although she did develop an odd, very strained, laugh for her character, which quickly becomes an annoying distraction. As Timothy, the rival for Molly’s loyal affections, Cláudio da Silva almost steals the show. A wonderful supporting cast of locality-appropriate extras and smaller roles (and puppeteers!) adds richness and depth to the story.

Grand Tour is an odd charmer. Brave, innovative, surprising, and disarmingly engaging, it doesn’t quite work on all levels, yet one is left feeling nothing but gratitude for Gomes’s vision and drive. This work is certainly much more interesting than many other films around at the moment.


If you love cinema, then this one is definitely for you.

More News

To Top