The experience of watching Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour is, for a time, like the experience of wandering into the wrong university classroom and having to stay for the lecture. Because you haven’t been there all term, it takes a while to get your bearings – in fact, that venture may seem entirely fruitless. If the lecture is a single hour, you might be better off just giving up and waiting it out. But if it’s two hours, it becomes a more productive use of your time to figure out what’s going on. And that choice can have great dividends.

The bearings are particularly hard to get in Grand Tour because they keep changing. We meet Edward (Goncolo Waddington) on a pier in Rangoon, January 1918, where he’s waiting in the rain with a bouquet of wilting flowers for the arrival of his fiancée from England, whom he hasn’t seen in seven years. Impulsively and as a sign of his ambiguity about the idea of marriage, in general but possibly to her specifically, he hops aboard a ship bound for Singapore. Then, with barely five minutes of screen time in each location, he makes his way through Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and China, like an escaping convict doubling back to cover his tracks.

The thing is, Edward is not the primary on-screen representation of each of these locations. His 1918 scenes are interspersed with scenes from each location set in modern times, showing locals involved in some form of performance, either traditional (dance or puppetry) or modern (karaoke). A narrator describes what’s happening in Edward’s story over these unrelated images, speaking in the local language with subtitles. And “modern times” is not exactly the correct description either, since a few scenes seem extracted from a film made in the 1970s.

That’s hour one of this impenetrable lecture, most of which is spent adjusting to what Gomes is doing. In hour two we finally meet the spurned fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), who is unconvinced by the most obvious interpretation of events – that Edward does not want to marry her – and doggedly pursues him in the vain hope of some alternate explanation. In her story following Edward’s route and meeting many of the same characters, the modern footage drops away, shifting focus to what becomes a sort of journey into the heart of darkness, and not only because part of it takes place on the Mekong. (That would be a reference not to Joseph Conrad’s original novel, but to Apocalypse Now.) This heart is not so much dark, but steadily breaking over the remainder of the narrative.

It’s hard entirely to understand how Gomes came by his concept for Grand Tour, but it does indeed increase in poignancy as it goes. Part of the initial difficulty is that we can’t get a handle on Edward, an ephemeral part of the proceedings even as he seems to be the film’s main character. This, we eventually realise, is by design. We are seeing Edward as Molly is seeing him – or rather, not seeing him. He is almost in our grasp but then slips away again, and much of this is heightened by the dream-like black and white in which the 1918 scenes are shot, through a steady, ethereal fog. Edward is an apparition, even possibly inviting the interpretation that he is no longer with us.

Molly, however, really centres the film, especially as much of the extraneous footage – while entertaining in its own, inscrutable right – ceases to be part of the story. On her journey we get to know other side characters, such as Ngoc (Lang Khe Tran), who becomes a companion to her, and Timothy (Claudio da Silva), who profiles as the sort of lecherous foreigner who falls in love with Molly too quickly and seems unbothered by the fact that she’s engaged, which she broadcasts to anyone she meets. As Molly’s quest becomes more quixotic, and it’s consistently Timothy at her side rather than her betrothed, he becomes less a comical and more a tragic figure, especially as Molly remains blind to what this journey is actually offering her.

The second half allows Gomes to indulge in a sense of mild comedy and the absurd that initially surfaces in the first half. One of the events that befalls Edward is that his train derails in the jungles of Thailand, referred to as Siam in 1918, though no one is injured. When Molly ultimately arrives at this same location, there are still passengers milling about the site, one of them a woman smoking a cigarette and making acerbic observations about the world. Surely in no literal version of events would anyone still be present for this, which can be no sooner than a few days after the train derailed. It just adds to the sense of metaphor that has been informing this whole film and will continue to do so.

Communication barriers, or their surprising absence, are also a preoccupation for Gomes, who won best director at Cannes for this film. This is embodied in the film’s ever-changing spoken languages. Portuguese may be considered sort of a default language, as it’s Gomes’ native language, though his main characters are supposed to be British (played by Portuguese actors). However, even the characters switch the language they speak at various junctures – in Vietnam, they speak French – and throughout, the narration is multilingual. When natives are speaking their own language in the 1918 scenes, it simply isn’t translated at all. Somehow it all works, and everyone understands each other – even if they frequently don’t understand themselves. At all times, Gomes’ love of this region of Asia – which at some points seems like the entirety of Asia – shines through.

Grand Tour makes an excellent argument for seeing films in the cinema. Not only will its black and white look great on the big screen, but that environment provides the ultimate protection against the instinct to bail after a first impression. Grand Tour is a tough nut to crack; maybe a better metaphor is being thrust into a foreign country without a map or language dictionary, than a lecture for a class you haven’t been attending. But the best tours contain these moments of disorientation, when you find yourself outside your comfort zone, before ultimately landing on the experience you want and need to have.

 

Grand Tour opens in cinemas tomorrow.