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‘Grand Tour’ Review: Miguel Gomes’ Dreamy, Delirious Time-Swirling Travelogue Through East and Southeast Asia


Bristling with life, song and revelatory collisions between cultures and timeframes, Miguel Gomes' "Grand Tour" is a healing balm for trying times.

But for anyone feeling a pessimism creeping in like slow poison and taking the edge off any appetite for adventure, Portuguese singularity Miguel Gomes comes like a comet across the Cannes competition with “ Grand Tour ” an enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent-crossing travelogue that runs the very serious risk of infecting you with the antidote: a potent dose of wanderlust-for-life. Monkeying around in time like a macaque in a hot spring, trundling through countries like a comically short-legged donkey on a jungle trail, yet somehow also peering down on the action from a lofty perch like a panda in the high bamboo, Gomes and co-writers Mariana Ricardo, Telmo Churro and Maureen Fazendeiro, embark on this wildly ambitious East Asian itinerary on the slenderest of pretexts. Hampered by Covid-era restrictions, a lot of the modern footage — credited to three cinematographers in Rui Poças, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Guo Liang — was directed remotely, while the period segments, whether in bamboo forests or Raffles Hotel or aboard a ship whose captain speaks in six different languages over the mooing of a cargo hold full of cows, were creations on a sound stage.

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