Sydney Film Festival Review - Grand Tour

 

“Arrived. Stop. M.”

Atemporal, beguiling and exotic, Grand Tour is an art house travelogue that blends dazzlingly beautiful and meticulous period scenes with vibrant contemporary footage, that’s more visually poetic than narratively cohesive, as it combines aspects of the Orient with ideas of Old Hollywood romanticism to mixed result.

Discussion Points:

I’m not saying Miguel Gomes is a bad director - but I will say I’m slightly surprised that he won the award for Best Director at Cannes this year over other directors who’s films I’ve also now seen that were at Cannes and were easily better directed in my opinion. Grand Tour is definitely more of an arthouse piece of filmmaking with lots of symbolism and visual poetry - but it also has a story that really could’ve been something memorable and engaging, but it’s not Gomes’ priority or even secondary focus and the film suffers as a result. The story and performances very much take a backseat to his desire to depict through both contemporary footage and meticulously crafted period scenes the complex and beautiful cultures of South East Asia and East Asia. It really is a grand tour through some of the most well known cities in the region, but we never spend much time with the people in these places. We see their cultural customs, but never their character. The cheeky comedy that peeks its head in every now and again got great reactions from my crowd and really made me wish it was more prevalent throughout. Ultimately, Grand Tour is beautiful to look it, but I found it unengaging and troublesome in its romanticism of the Orient whilst never actually engaging with its people.