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Grand Tour Is a Deliberately Ramshackle Yet Captivating Work of Art
Miguel Gomes’s globetrotting, language-spanning film gently refutes any conventional moviegoing expectations.
In following the fanciful story of two lovers journeying separately through East and Southeast Asia in the early 20th century, Gomes mixes staged scenes with documentary footage — some of it distinctly modern, some of it seemingly more timeless. Waiting with a bouquet of flowers for her ship to arrive in Mandalay, Edward imagines himself “floating gently in the muddy river stream.” It’s a quiet dream of freedom as a state of being, tossed this way and that. The voices on the soundtrack narrating Edward and Molly’s stories in their own languages give the sense that they’ve already become myths, phantoms in a place that remains forever strange to them — even as its very ordinariness shines through in the realistic textures of what we’re actually seeing.
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