Portugal experimental art movies are generally not inspired by something as typically English as the writing of W Somerset Maugham – and you would not expect their soundtracks starring the “Song of Eston Navigation”. But then Tall tour is an extravagant culture culture exercise, and the Portuguese writer-director Miguel Gomes a notoriously playful fog of conventional cinematographic forms. Known for its distinctive fiction and documentary mixtures, Deadpan Melancholy and an offbeat comedy, Gomes specializes in leading viewers on unpredictable travel – in his new film Tall tourliterally.
His story implies a young British couple in Southeast Asia in 1918: Diplomat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), who fled on the eve of his marriage; And his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaaitus), who pursues him tenaciously from country to country. Made in black and white, in a Spot-On pastiche of Hollywood productions from the 1930s, this bit of Tall tour – Turned on studio sets – first shows the Edward ever more jaded during a long picaresque trip from Mandalay to Shanghai, then follows Molly on the same road, exuberant, with wide eyes and passionate for a new experience. Intercut with all this is contemporary documentary images that Gomes has shot this same route, before writing the film's script.
The idea was inspired by Gomes Read the Somerset Maugham travel book in 1930 The gentleman in the living room And by meeting a comment on men being cowards, stubborn women with regard to marriage – just as he was about to marry his frequent collaborator, filmmaker Maureen Fazendeiro. The couple embarked on their own Asian odyssey, with their co-writers and a skeleton crew, then woven a story around the images. Like Gomes, 53, explains it on Zoom, “it's a prosecution – there is this guy who fled this woman, but there is also the spectator who tries to continue what we have shot and put him with the images of the studio. Everyone continues something in the film.”
It was a complicated shoot, or rather shots. Gomes, Fazendeiro and the party began their trip to Myanmar, worked east and were about to enter China at the beginning of 2020 when the cocovated pandemic started and they had to return home; Gomes later made a Chinese crew remotely from Lisbon. Even later, the adventures of Edward and Molly were filmed on sound scenes in Lisbon and Rome, in recreation of parameters, including a bamboo forest, a royal palace in Bangkok and the Hotel Raffles show in Singapore, with its famous ceiling fans. The result is an elegant atmospheric evocation of classic Hollywood cinema, redolent of orientalist novels formerly produced by Josef von Sternberg (Shanghai Express,, Shanghai's gesture). But there is also a large dose of the exhilarating fantasy of the same vis -à -vis comedy, with Howard Hawks Rack as a particular model.
Scripted by Gomes, Fazendeiro and two other writers (presented as the “Central Committee”), Tall tour can strike it like a hipster getaway that touches; In fact, the film very much challenges the Western history of travel cinema. The traditional colonial point of view – also associated with Portuguese and British culture – is undermined by the narration of the voiceover in several Asian languages, as well as a sufficient dialogue which remains poble without title.
How was the film team itself avoided being simply tourists during their trip? Take pensive slugs from a glass of red wine at lunchtime, Gomes says: “I think we were Tourists in the traditional sense. The question is whether to be a good tourist or a bad. We knew that it would be impossible to pretend that we were initiates. One of the goals of this trip was to go somewhere far from our daily life and try to catch something that would be interesting in different ways – funny or touching, beautiful, graceful. To recover part of the feeling of wonder.
“We know too much, we have seen too many films, we go to all the places in the world. It is difficult to recover a kind of innocence, the ability to be amazed.”
Astonishment in Tall tour Partly comes from the Pasche element and stylized performance. “I encouraged the actors to avoid being naturalistic and having fun as much as Katharine Hepburn when she made this kind of film,” says Gomes. He spent a whole day with actress Crista AlfaaTe to find the perfect laughter for Molly: she finally offered a hoarse and dirty raspberry.
Then, there is the intertwining of dramatic sequences and the contemporary reality of documentary images, whether spectacular (puppet shows, a giant Buddha statue, pandas and macaques in nature) or everyday life (the massos mass of Saigon, a man singing in “my way” tears in a mangeal bar). People encountered on the way have contributed to the story in an improbable way, as a Vietnamese good adventure said that Fazendeiro consulted in the form of Molly. “Maureen gave her a false date of birth and claimed that she was not married, and from the start, the tier of the good adventure was suspect – she was good.” Even thus, his predictions on the fate of Molly found their way in the story.
The shooting used local teams wherever it was going – a constant being the director of Thai photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who recently turned Luca Guadagnino Weird (Images of the studio in Tall tour was filmed by another regular, Rui Poças). The end credits only give sparse details for the Myanmar crew, noting that they can no longer be contacted because of the military coup of 2021. “Myanmar today”, says Gomes, “is a scandalous political problem that nobody talks about.”
When their own tour was interrupted, Gomes and Fazendeiro took the time to co -edit a locking film, Tsugua newspapers – A room played upside down on a single month (“tsugua” being in August upside down). Gomes generally designs his films on unusual formal lines. Our beloved month of August (2008) begins as a documentary on amateur dance groups, then transforms its real participants into fictitious characters in a rural melodrama. Tabu (2012), which ostensibly takes place in the contemporary Lisbon, suddenly jumps into Portuguese colonial Africa in the 1960s, to tell a love story haunted by a “sad and melancholy crocodile”.
So there is everything of their kind Three films project Arab nights (2015), in response to the economic crisis in Portugal: “It has just happened, so let's try to do something with that, the fastest possible way – almost like doing live fiction.” He was made in collaboration with a team of journalists gleaning stories from across the country; The resulting dramatic and documentary episodes are interspersed with sequences inspired by the A Thousand and one nightLarkly. Alladdin. Gomes himself is seen at the beginning to flee his panic crew to embark on such a ambitious project. He promotes these self-reflexive keys: “It is a way to involve the spectator. The spectator does not only follow the intrigue, but also looks at the birth of the film. You are one of them.”
Gomes grew up in Lisbon and realized how much he loved cinema around the age of 10, when he fought during Dumbo Because other children laughed misfortunes of the elephant. He graduated from this Raiders of the lost archThen to the new French wave of his adolescence. The decisive spark that made it go to the film school was a now forgotten jewel of Portuguese cinema, Yellow House Remollections (1989), by the deeply eccentric actor-director João Cesar Monteiro. “It's cinema,” recalls Gomes. “It's a portrait of Lisbon, it doesn't look like everything I know, and it's incredible.”
The director, who also served for several years as a film critic in the newspaper Publicsometimes said that all of his films are essentially remakes of Oz assistant. This classic, he explains, contains two cinema possibilities, the real and the imaginary. “Dorothy lives in the countryside in Kansas: she is bored with her daily life and she dreams of another place – and this place is the cinema in Technicolor. In a way, each film I have made with this kind of feeling – let's see what kansas can bring to Oz and what Oz can change to kansas. ”
'Large tour' is on Mubi now
