Revue 'Grand Tour': colonialist past, current vibrant mix

“Grand Tour”, the latest film in Portugal Miguel Gomesis stuck in the past, beautifully thus, and yet the present continues to slip, insisting on being heard. But where other directors could look back to lounge in nostalgia – whether by affection for a bygone era or an archaic cinema style – the director of “Tabu” And “Arabian Nights” calls into question the very notion of what we call “the past”, making a story during which the periods are hypnotically overlapping.

In this attractive travel account, we are not always sure where (or when) we are, but Gomes of the anti-love pierces of Gomes because of its playful audacity. “Large tour” is an enveloping drama which is much more than the sum of its parts – except that the pieces are as wonderful alone.

We are in January 1918, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a trivial civil servant for the British Empire, is on the run. On the eve of marrying Molly (Crista Alfaaitus), his fiancée whom he has not seen for seven years, Edward obtains cold feet, fleeing Rangoon to escape his beloved. The first hour of the film focuses on his agitated – train and boat getaway from Singapore to Saigon in Shanghai – while the second hour swivel the much lighter monitoring of Molly from Edward, her Caquette de la femme de Vis à à -à -Vis, only one element of the film of Gomes, who feels consciously deactivated. Shot in black and silver white, shot on sound scenes and played with a known theatricality, “Grand Tour” plays like a first lost talkie which was saved from a dusty safe.

But from the first frames of the film, Gomes continues to interrupt its history, allowing the disorderly vitality of modern life to flood the story. Contemporary documentary images of different puppet shows across Asia are interspersed with Vives street scenes which offer a current overview of locations where the romantic misadventures of Edward and Molly are a popular. The mixture of the film of out-of-screen speakers often provides a context for what is happening in the history of 1918 when we see modern images which correspond to the action described. (For example, during a time when Edward walks in a restaurant of Japanese noodles, Gomes shows documentary images of a current sequence.)

The initially discordant juxtaposition of then and now – fiction and documentary – quickly becomes intoxicating, inviting the spectator to both contemplate incessant time and reflect on transparent temporal transitions. Sneakily, the device repeatedly undermines the supposed importance of the parallel odysses of Edward and Molly. From our contemporary point of view, their tiny existence has been erased, replaced by the bustle of circulation and the jackitis of everyday life.

Likewise, British colonial control of the region now belongs to the past. Even those of Edward's orbit feel the winds of change.

“The end of the Empire is inevitable,” he warned. “It's a matter of years, maybe months. We will leave without understanding one thing. “

The genesis of the film was accidental, Gomes inspired by a brief passage in the Voyages collection of W. Somerset Maugham in 1935, “The Gentleman in the Parlour”, in which the author tells a story he heard about an Englishman trying to retreat from his imminent marriage, traveling through Asia to keep a step ahead. (In a funny way, Gomes himself was about to get married when he read the book.) But rather than writing the intrigue of Edward and Molly, Gomes and his creative team first traced the stages of this English – even if the tale was probably apocryphal – spinning what they met along the way with the help of SAYOMBHU MUKDEEPROMA director of frequent photography for Luca Guadagnino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. After studying the documentary images, all this transporting without exoticing the localities, Gomes and its coudriters wrote the period of period based on this visual material.

The result is a film in which the 20th century and the 21st century are continuing continuously. Sometimes the two eras bleed into one, which makes it almost impossible to know if we are witness or present. (After three views, I am not entirely convinced that a mobile phone that rings in a scene is contemporary or, rather, a shy anachronistic joke incorporated into a segment of 1918.) This temporal mixture, far from being a coldly experimental exercise, immerses us in the pure pleasure of narration, as light and free as these magic puppets sometimes show wines.

As interprets, Waddington and Alfaiatte are less timeless than they are not time, bringing the soul and shading to the archetypes of silent film of the shy man and his coppery daughter. In an impressive way, the “big tower” illuminates the artificiality of its external signs while honoring them, explaining our collective acceptance of the “reality” of the unreality of cinema. The characters' dilemma can ultimately be meaningless against reflux and flows of history, but Gomes, which won the staging prize during last year Cannes Film FestivalInvesting with such elegance that it becomes almost mythical: a touching fable of cowardice and devotion with tragic nuances. The scenes can be dreamlike, but we are our shared dream of being swept away by films.

Sporadically, Gomes goes even further to remind us that everything we look at is a construction. (A brief rupture of the fourth wall towards the end of the film is magnificent.) But also intellectually stimulating that the “big tour”, the film fully records as an emotional and ecstatic experience. It is also a gas. Few filmmakers would be sufficiently upset to slide one of the most famous – and parodied music of music – the most famous, Strauss's “Danube Blue”, forever synonymous with “2001: A Space Odyssey”, and find a fresh and poetic use. Here, the music marks an extraordinary montage which includes a sumptuous ball in 1918, the exploits of a fishing boat and a fleet of mopeds sailing in slow motion. Throughout “big tour”, then and now are joined in a glorious dance, creating something new again from the remains of the past – gone but not forgotten.