Sukhdev Sandhu
Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s strangely eurythmic reimagining of Somerset Maugham’s 1930 novel The Gentleman in the Parlour.
Gonçalo Waddington as Edward in Grand Tour. Courtesy CMPR.
Grand Tour, directed by Miguel Gomes,
now playing at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City
• • •
To Asia? A splendid idea. Very, very splendid. Time was when all sorts of Brits would head East. To Calcutta, Bangkok, Rangoon. The hope? Disorientation. An army private in Kipling’s poem “Mandalay,” back in Blighty, pines for a land “Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst; / For the temple bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be.” The posh went for palaces and pagodas, monasteries and mystique, ancient citadels and radiant horizons. Most of all, for escape. In The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930), Somerset Maugham confesses, “I travel because . . . it pleases me to be rid of ties, responsibilities, duties . . . I am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little.”
Barely anyone reads Somerset Maugham today. Certainly not The Gentleman in the Parlour, an account of a journey from Burma to Vietnam that the married author undertook (though he doesn’t mention it) with a male lover. An exception is Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, who was especially tickled by its tale of an English chap called George flitting across Southeast Asia, from city to city, to avoid having to wed his longtime fiancée. A hardy gal, one of the great undeterrables, she follows in his tracks, quay to quay, eventually hunting him down before declaring, “I’m ready to marry him as soon as I’ve had a bath.”
Crista Alfaiate as Molly in Grand Tour. Courtesy CMPR.
Gomes’s Grand Tour—meticulously woozy, rapturously sardonic, seriously unserious—is a reimagining of that episode, which may or may not have been made up in the first instance (how I hope it’s true!). The film begins in 1918. English civil servant Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is waiting at the port of Rangoon for the arrival, after seven years without seeing her, of his fiancée, Molly Singleton (Crista Alfaiate). Rain-sodden, he gets cold feet and vamooses to Singapore, where, in the bar of the Raffles Hotel, he runs into Molly’s cousin and gets the chap to believe that his harbor-hopping might be linked—nudge-nudge, wink-wink—to espionage shenanigans.
The film’s first half tracks Edward as he leaps, like a tick, across Manila, Saigon, Osaka, and Shanghai to near the Tibetan border. He’ll take whatever transport’s clever—midnight train, steamboat, an American warship (that last on what we’re told was—delicious phrase—a “night of utter folly”). His companions, always fleeting, include sailors, Filipina prostitutes, and Komusō Buddhists, also known as “priests of nothingness.” At times carried through the jungle by coolies, Edward could be an Indiana Jones–style adventurer, an escape artist like George Sanders in The Saint; in fact, he often comes across as dissociated, like Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth or the languidly linen-clad Jeremy Irons in Brideshead Revisited. After a rail crash, he emerges from a train carriage, thinks “what a beautiful morning,” and starts sketching the birdlife around him.
Crista Alfaiate as Molly and Lang Khê Tran as Ngoc in Grand Tour. Courtesy CMPR.
What kind of woman would devote herself to pursuing a fellow who’s too dreary to be a cad or a bounder, whose smirks and singing of the “Eton Boating Song” bring to mind a self-mythologizing chump like Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson? The film’s second half is devoted to Molly. She’s all flapper energy, screwball sass, has an absurd laugh, which she lets out at moments when others would opt for solemnity. Hard not to cheer as she fends off the advances of the leery brute of an American cattle trader who has designs on her. And impossible not to feel for her as she’s grilled about her emotions by a table of bores at a below-deck dining room while cows bellow and fart close by. Time passes with no sight or sound of Edward. The mood becomes darker. Does she, too, have tropical malady?
Gomes’s British empire is a karaoke kingdom. Its key characters may be from Blighty, but they’re voiced in Portuguese by Portuguese actors. Its diplomatic corps are sottish or syphilitic. Molly meets a churchman whose religious fervor, she hopes, will strengthen her desire to find Edward; turns out he’s renounced his diocese and is returning to his native Yorkshire to eat toast with blueberry jam. An opium-blootered consul murmurs to Edward, “We will leave without having understood a thing.” That much is obvious in a scene in which a clutch of women, exuding the plain-day beauty of the cover stars of Chris Marker’s Petite Planète series, look at Edward: they’re silent, farouche, judging. He can barely absorb their gaze.
Cast and Gonçalo Waddington as Edward in Grand Tour. Courtesy CMPR.
Is Grand Tour really about Asia? Vertigo is its most vivid habitat. Its opening shots of a Ferris wheel being hand-pulled involve irregularly paced revolutions, dangling locals, life upside down. A later sequence, soundtracked by Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz, homes in on rush hour in Saigon: what should be chaos and congestion becomes eurhythmy, a gorgeous slow-motion dance of scooters whose drivers—male and female, young and old—glide effortlessly away from oncoming vehicles. They navigate turbulence with grace.
Such footage seems to have nothing to do with Edward or Molly’s story. It’s shot in the present day, high-end ethnography rather than fiction, in color rather than the black-and-white of the other scenes, which were created on a soundstage. Siam is now called Thailand. Burma is Myanmar. Are they the same places? Flux and ferment: throughout Grand Tour, the ground beneath the characters’ feet is in a state of constant churn, images are superimposed to hint at time’s density and elusiveness, the gulf between now and then is wobbly, the voice-overs (which are far from reliable) keep changing as the protagonists move through different countries.
Still from Grand Tour. Courtesy CMPR.
The puppet shows in these nations bewitch Gomes. Their colors and melodies, their movement and sudden sways, the deep mythologies from which they draw and bring to life, their tactile presentness. As much as the antics of the human and animal figures, it’s the delicacy, skill, and labor of the puppeteers pulling their strings that Gomes finds—and makes—seductive. Perhaps he sees himself in them?
Having come to Grand Tour expecting a historical drama or a Lombard-and-Powell romantic comedy, I was miffed at first. Its argument was unclear. Its lovers-not-lovers were cartoonish. But tired of myself, open to derailment, I watched it again, this time falling for its anachronisms and off-notes, its fever drifts and dream fugues. Says one of its characters, a monk with a basket on his head: “Abandon yourself to the world and you’ll see how it rewards you.” Perhaps perhaps perhaps.
Sukhdev Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University. A former Critic of the Year at the British Press Awards, he writes for the Guardian, makes radio documentaries for the BBC, and runs the Texte and Töne publishing imprint.