GRAND TOUR

Watch The Trailer

Storyline (warning: spoilers)

In colonial Burma during the first world war, Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is a minor British functionary in Rangoon, unhappily waiting for the arrival of the London boat, on which is the woman to whom he has for seven years been engaged: Molly (Crista Alfaiate). But Edward gets cold feet and before Molly arrives, he flees to Singapore, where he runs into his fiancé’s rackety cousin in the bar of the Raffles hotel, and allows this seedy and excitable man to believe that his own extraordinary, furtive behaviour has something to do with spying.
Living like a hobo, Edward goes on to Bangkok, Saigon, Manila and Osaka, from where he is expelled by Japanese authorities for his suspected connection with US naval intelligence. Then he goes to Shanghai, Chongqing and Tibet where he sees pandas in the trees and meets an opium-addicted British consul who tells him the empire is finished and that westerners will never understand the oriental mind. But the formidable Molly is hot on his trail and not to be deterred.
The movie’s first half is Edward’s perhaps rather somnolent story but the second half belongs to Molly’s more eventful, even sensational quest narrative. We have time to get to know this complicated, determined woman with her odd, spluttering laugh and a predisposition to faint in public which may be epilepsy. The voiceover narration is in the various languages of each of the places the story is set and, in keeping with Gomes’s docu-realist approach to fiction, the tale is interspersed with scenes of the modern-day cities in which each scene takes place.
Grand Tour looks to be a romantic, extravagant and comic epic – with some accumulating suspense as Molly begins, against all odds, to catch up with her timid fiancé Grand Tour is a unique and valuable experience.