Grand Tour It is an atypical film with which the Portuguese Miguel Gomes received the prize for the best direction at the Cannes Festival of 2024. It takes place in the midst of a melancholic and evocative atmosphere, wrapped in a powerfully unique and sensitive narrative that travels between black and white filmed in 16 mm and color, between images of the present and others of the present of the story with different narrators.
Grand Tourwhich from this April 18 can already be seen in streaming By Mubi, it is the story of Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) and Molly (Crist of pure beautification.
The idea of this story arose from a travel book called Gentleman in the Parlour of the famous W. Somerset Maugham, which was located in the Southeast Asia. In three pages of this book, the author told the history of the marriage of a British couple. From there the story of Edward and Molly came out. “In the book it is counted as a real event, but we investigate, and we are looking for a marriage certificate at the Chengdu Consulate, in China, in 1918, and we did not discover anything – says Miguel Gomes in an exclusive interview with Forbes.” Then we believe that it is a story told as a true fact but never happened. ”
Grand Tour It has a management of space-time that seems to have no logic, but that it responds to the fact that, says the Portuguese filmmaker whose solid filmography includes eight feature films, “the cinema has that potential to work with the time that is often ignored. We do not take advantage of that potential that the cinema has, but that exists and that I am very interested in exploring.”
And it is that in the movie the characters are seen in situations located in 1918 but in which sometimes deliberately elements of current life are left deliberately, such as a cell phone on the ground. In addition, while the characters are not on the screen and one of the several narrators tells what happened, the aforementioned activities are seen in the present images that the same can be of a group of motorcynlets circulating in Saigon that a group of elders playing the Mahjong.
“In the study we filmed a story that takes place in 1918 and, at the same time, we have the places through which the characters pass today. And there were several reasons to do this, one of them is that we see the characters in the scene, doing their actions for a certain time and there is another time in which we no longer have the place where they are, we are no longer in the studio, we are there for them. History of what happens with them, which forces the viewer to project the invisible characters to another space and another time, which is why we have these images.
In addition, Miguel Gomes, awarded at the International Film Festival in Guadalajara for Docudrama That dear month of Augustinterspersed small acts that are developed with different puppet styles, each very typical of the different countries in which the story of Grand Tour then.
“We discovered the puppets when we investigated for the film, because there were traditions and forms of very different puppets between each of these countries. One of them is almost precine That, in reality, that was cinema many years before the cinema existed, because it is a tradition that exists for centuries in these countries, in Thailand, in Malaysia.
The fact that Grand Tour Transit between black and white and color responded to technical and apparently random reasons. The production had for the filming film in 16mm to black and white. “It is good to film daytime situations, where there is light, but it does not serve to film at night, for darker situations – explains the also director of the trilogy Arabian Nights-. So, we had to use color in color to capture these moments and then transform them in black and white into the edition. ”
In fact, there was a time when the full film was black and white. “Until the day we get fed up with black and white and decided to put color again. So, for a reason that is not entirely rational, motivated only by technical reasons, there are 5% of the film in color, without any logic. Logic is pleasure, which is a very ignorable logic. That in a black and white movie, from time to time the color appears, it is incredible, but it has no rational logic. Work over time, which is often ignored. ”
So the change in black and white color also worked to highlight the moments so different that are seen on the screen. “In 1918, Asia lived a large part of its territory under a colonial policy, it was dominated by the European colonial powers and today we are in a post -colonial era, perhaps we can say that we are colonized in other ways, but not in the way we were in 1918. And I would like to see what would happen if I mixed these two things.”
Add the Portuguese filmmaker who won the Fipresci Award at the Berlin Festival for Taboo: “I was not sure what the result would be, but I liked to experience this mixture, these constant transitions between two different times, which essentially form a unique cinematographic time. And as usually happens with my movies, when I start I am not very sure what the final result will be, what could give, and the only way to know is to do it. And that is why, if they leave me, I do it.”
Something similar happened with its commitment to a choral narrative in different languages. Although in the first instance Grand Tour He had a choral narrative, but only in Portuguese. “Generally, the narrator off in the cinema has too much power, it seems to be the voice of the authority. It is a unique voice, he speaks of all, he has the last word. And suddenly, we seemed interesting to have several voices, as if they were several witnesses of what was happening with the characters, and there was a time when we thought that those voices would have to be local voices. That is, witnesses we will never see, but that we will never see, we will Maybe they are inventing the story.
Musical themes also seem to have a meaning. Miguel Gomes argues that there was no global idea, although the viewer does not seem like this, for which to include Bobby Darin with “Beyond the Sea” or the “Eton Boating Song” or the Aryan of Act 3, Scene 2 of The troubadour de Verdi, “Ah yes, well mine, with being yours … of that pira”, que el “Danube azul” de strauss or “here with me” en Vietnamese.
“They come in various moments from various places,” Miguel Gomes tells Forbes. And each one will have its own story.
*Javier Pérez He reports, chronicle and interview, as well as film critic and coverage of cultural issues. Directs Hole. Nobody wants to accompany him to the cinema: he does not stop eating popcorn or talking about anything else.
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