The gaze of a judgmental Southeast Asian woman finds its way to Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), Grand Tour‘s antihero. Well, he’s one of the antiheroes in Miguel Gomes’ new film that exists with two halves within a kaleidoscopic palimpsest. The film tells his story twice – once conventionally and another through narration of several Asian voices. It then juxtaposes that narration with images of contemporary Asia. The second half tells the story of Edward’s fiancee, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), following his trail despite everyone advising her otherwise. Nothing stops her from taking the same journey he’s taking, not even Timothy Sanders’ (Cláudio da Silva) marriage proposal.

Determined, Molly steals Timothy’s gardener Ngoc (Lang Khê Tran), the latter having her own plans to live in 1910s Vietnam. Anyway, as a Filipino, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the scenes in Manila, especially the karaoke one. Because a Filipino, a century after Edward’s lotharian stopover, sings “My Way” and gets to live after the last note. The narration between Manila and Tokyo is also funny because there are better Tagalog words to describe sex workers. The narration also calls into attention that again, these Asian voices are telling the story of a British man’s journey. While hearing the narration, I kept asking myself why these Asians are telling this story – there’s only one answer.  The short answer is that they don’t, they’re not, but then again I am not an Asian from the 1910s.

Grand Tour, in its defense and to paraphrase some words above, does have an admirable metanarrative sense of play. The characters are English interacting with the locals but they’re speaking in Portuguese, sometimes French. It belongs to centuries of international storytelling tradition where people tell stories about people from other nations. But maybe it’s the story itself that isn’t compelling enough. Of a man touring (South)East Asia to avoid a clueless woman. One may ask why doesn’t Edward just tell Molly that he doesn’t want to marry her, why is she stubbornly following him. The latter question has more sociological reasons, and the answer to the former is that ‘if they break up, there’s no film’.

Grand Tour‘s answers to its questions aren’t good enough, but again, I’ll give it some benefit of the doubt for its cheekiness. Maybe the one Portuguese person reading this can chime in, but the only thing Portuguese is, again, the characters’ dialogues. Not once do the characters go to Macau, which is easier for the characters to realistically do instead of going up the Yangtze. Part of Edward and Molly’s quasi-separate journeys also take place in the leg of the escape route of modern North Koreans. And back to the film, part of that route is around Bangkok. There, a train derailment has Molly talking to another European woman. In general, the film aims for palimpsest but most of what I see are digressions to a story with characters as insufferable as me.

After its run in select North American theatres, Grand Tour streams on MUBI Canada.