It is the beginning of 1918, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a minor English diplomat in Burma (modern-day Myanmar), wanders sullenly through a rainy Rangoon, dreaming of escape. It is not the destruction of World War I that weighs on him. Rather, it is the impending arrival of Molly (Crista Alfaiate), his fiancée of seven years, that terrifies him. In a moment of panic, Edward ditches a bouquet of bird of paradise flowers—a welcome gift for his betrothed—and takes flight, boarding a ship for Singapore and leaving word that Molly should return to London. Determined to marry, Molly instead follows Edward to Singapore and beyond, embarking on a sweeping journey through Southeast and East Asia.

Thus begins Grand Tour, the sixth and latest feature by Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes (now streaming on MUBI). The film premiered in the 2024 Cannes Film Festival’s Competition to acclaim, winning Gomes the Best Director award. Gomes’s work has earned a reputation for being equal parts charming and challenging—poetic, playful, and always ready to upend viewers’ expectations. Grand Tour is no exception. The film is a sprawling, messy, and dreamy odyssey that isn’t afraid to throw a few curveballs.

One of the inspirations for Grand Tour is Somerset Maugham’s travelogue The Gentleman in the Parlour, which recounts the author’s journey from Rangoon to Haiphong. The film follows Edward on a similar route—Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Manila, Osaka, Shanghai, and Chongqing toward Tibet—with Molly always hot on his trail. Before writing the script, Gomes and his team embarked on a research trip along this itinerary. They began filming in 2020 but were sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic, with Gomes directing cinematographer Guo Liang remotely from Lisbon. After reviewing the footage, Gomes co-wrote the script with Mariana Ricardo, Telmo Churro, and Maureen Fazendeiro. Filming of the scripted scenes resumed in 2022, shot entirely on soundstages in Europe.

Footage from that research trip is included in the film, to curious effect. The documentary footage is not disguised—it’s very clearly from the present: we see telephone poles, modern cars, locals wearing Nike. This constant juxtaposition challenges the viewer’s sense of time. We see intimate portraits of modern life: a man getting his hair cut in an alley in Shanghai, young men climbing a grease pole in Myanmar, women harvesting red lotus flowers in Thailand. One of the film’s most striking moments features a man in Manila delivering a tearful karaoke rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” before quietly sitting down to dinner alone.

These scenes loosely align with the plot, using documentary footage that mirrors the characters’ locations. A voice-over—typically in the local language—narrates what the characters are doing. For example, as a tuk-tuk aggressively weaves through Bangkok traffic, a Thai narrator describes Edward’s drunken hijinks in Thailand. The result is that the division between past and present is blurred, sometimes in jarring ways. In one scene, as Edward travels through a forest en route to Thailand, we see a shot of a ringing cell phone on the ground. This is not an errant bit of documentary footage but a deliberate rupture—present bleeding into the past.

This scene is perhaps emblematic of the film’s broader preoccupation with drawing attention to its own artifice. Grand Tour is explicitly inspired by American screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s. Waddington and Alfaiate’s performances evoke old Hollywood, as do the intricately detailed yet unmistakably staged sets. As a result, the documentary footage often feels more immediate and engaging than the scripted scenes—a tension that may be entirely intentional. As Gomes notes in the film’s press kit, there are multiple “grand tours” at play: “Above all there is this immense tour that unites what is divided – countries, genders, times, reality and the imaginary, the world and the cinema.”

Throughout the film, we encounter karaoke performances, shadow puppetry, marionettes, even an opera singer bursting into an aria after a disastrous captain’s dinner. In this way, Grand Tour becomes a metacommentary on the act of filmmaking itself and its place within a global tradition of performance and storytelling.

If this all sounds heady and demanding, that’s because it is. Grand Tour may be visually stunning and playful, but it's also a highly ambitious film that asks a great deal of its audience. At just over two hours, it can at times feel exasperating. By the end, the film pushes the tension between reality and artifice to its breaking point, and whether it ultimately sticks the landing remains an open question.

Edward and Molly never quite emerge as fully realized, empathetic characters. It’s unclear how much we’re meant to invest in them—or in their relationship. Edward, melancholic and (we’re told) prone to debauchery, contrasts with Molly, who is indefatigable and often amused by Edward’s cowardice, expressing this through a distinctive sputtering laugh. They function as foils, but they also move through the film as allegorical figures of British colonization.

Edward flirts and ogles women in ways that feel overtly objectifying, while Molly (sometimes quite literally) drags others into her journey, ultimately with tragic consequences. That these supposed agents of the British Empire speak entirely in Portuguese introduces another layer of political complexity, invoking Portugal’s own colonial legacy.

This commentary only begins to unpack Grand Tour. Dreamy, visionary, and often visually arresting, it’s not a film for the impatient. But for those willing to engage with its demands, it offers a rewarding meditation on time, storytelling, and our cultural relationships with the world around us. If you are willing to sit with it, Grand Tour is worth the journey.