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Miguel Gomes’ latest film is a rip-roaring journey through the imagined Asia of early 20th-century travelers and the traces of that world still left behind. Grand Tour plays on its title both by having it be the train tracks of the film’s story—which follows British civil servant Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) as he flees from his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), across the path of the Asian “grand tour”—while also interspersing the narrative with documentary footage taken by Gomes and his team as they embarked on their own grand tour of the film’s real locations before writing the script.

Introduced sopping wet on a pier in Burma, Edward has thrown himself into a miserable picaresque of his own making, brilliantly realized in black-and-white 16mm on delicately detailed soundstages by Gomes’ regular cinematographer Rui Poças. Edward will stow away on boats, travel by foot through the wilderness, hide out in a Japanese monastery—anything to keep ahead of Molly, who despite it all still tries to pursue him. 

In the press kit, Gomes describes Grand Tour as a classic screwball setup where man is the prey and woman is the huntress. However, a key difference is that the two don’t play off each other. In fact, their stories are told entirely separately, with Edward’s playing out in its entirety before Molly’s perspective begins. Waddington and Alfaiate do give classical performances: the former plays a traditionally dour man whose merit deteriorates over the course of the film, yet he somehow beco*es more endearing at the same time; the latter runs around Southeast Asia with a quirkiness worthy of Claudette Colbert and Katharine Hepburn. The Portuguese actors play anglophones with the casualness of James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan pretending to be Hungarian in The Shop Around The Corner, heightening the artifice of Gomes’ exercise. 

The documentary sequences provide a stunning textural contrast to the narrative body of Grand Tour. While the soundstage sequences were filmed by Poças, the non-fictional grand tour is largely shot by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s regular cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who had a prolific slate of 2024 releases, also shooting Trap, Challengers, and Queer), with the exception of the China sequences, filmed during COVID lockdowns by Guo Liang. These moments at once strip the romantic orientalism inherent to using old-school Hollywood aesthetics and the world of turn-of-the-century traveler’s journals, and creates a curious modern memoir through a globalized Southeast and East Asia. 

While Edward and Molly’s trip is made up of steam ships, train cars, and ponies through the forest, Gomes’ journey finds a world of automobiles and mopeds circling LED-soaked avenues. One sequence, where Edward meets the King of Siam, who is a young boy with a co*ically regal affectation, Strauss’ “The Blue Danube” waltzes along with Edward’s escape as the film cuts again to documentary footage—a modern fishing boat takes the audience to Vietnam, where bikes dance around the main drag of Ho Chi Minh City in slow motion. 

Gomes’ personal grand tour too provides insight into the homogenization of culture in the post-colonial 21st century. Some old traditions are still in place, like the marionettes and shadow plays, but there are also the more modern things that could be set anywhere if not for their local bent. Grand Tour opens with stunning footage of a man-powered ferris wheel, where attendants jump on and off the sides of the capsules, or lean underneath the wheel, performing daring dives as the cars fly overhead before they push them along in unbelievable feats of athleticism. There is also a karaoke sequence in Manila, culminating in a heartbreaking, drunken rendition of “My Way” by Frank Sinatra, something that could happen anywhere in the world, but has taken on a deadly connotation in the Philippines. 

The narrative-within-documentary nesting creates a diptych within a diptych—one contrasting the real against the remembered, the other setting the co*edic cowardice of men against the unyielding determination of the women that pursue them. Edward and Molly’s drives seem equally ridiculous when juxtaposed. Why would Edward go to the ends of the Earth just to shirk co*mitment, and why would Molly go to the same ends to recapture the man who’s running from her for seemingly no reason? Moreover, the past-tense narrative and present-tense non-narrative emphasizes the absurdity of European adventurism. 

In this way, 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 than filmmakers like Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino, who seek to create a world all their own based on their obsessions with particular images of the past, building their own 20th centuries in aesthetic blenders. Instead, Gomes picks apart an imagined past by experiencing its present, at the same time sharply unpacking the screwball co*edy by separating the running man and the pursuing woman.

Director: Miguel Gomes

Writer: Telmo Churro, Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo

Starring: Gonçalo Waddington, Crista Alfaiate, Cláudio da Silva, Lang Khê Tran, Jorge Andrade, João Pedro Vaz, João Pedro Bénard, Teresa Madruga, Joana Bárcia

Release Date: March 28, 2025