Miguel Gomez's “Grand Tour” angers settlers – Liberation

Following in the footsteps of a jilted woman who tracks down her promised civil servant across Asia at the turn of the 20th century, the Portuguese director's hybrid epic fails miserably.

It was expected Grand tour He walks with us and amazes us. Our privilege as a spectator at Cannes is two-thirds of the way through a formal competition that destabilizes by alternating between not-so-great objects and punches in the gut, and as an adoring spectator of Miguel Gomez's cinema—a quick contemplation of stunning beauty. Muharram Or the multiplying odyssey of the trio One Thousand and One Nights It was enough to bring back enthusiasm and impatience as the show approached. but Grand tour It denies us both, a change of scenery and wonder. Perhaps the fault of his restrictive perception, since the initial project of a film shot in parallel on the road between Burma, China, Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines and in the studio in Lisbon and Rome was halted for two years by the pandemic; On screen, the imagined hybrid (“Kind of Found footage A present that will serve us to establish connections with what is happening in the past, in 1918, in the fictional Asia recreated in the studio.” It never finds its shape or coherence, the missing link between 16mm travelogue, in the present, and historical fiction dressed like a scar that won't heal.