Miguel Gomes’ 2024 drama film, Grand Tour, a masterclass in storytelling, deals with historic and politically loaded themes like the White man’s lens looking at Southeast Asia. It is a masterpiece in how it blends technique with storytelling. I stress on both denominators here–‘White’ and ‘man,’ as it dictates the central movement of the film as it moves from a travelogue to a spiritual quest for meaning. With its colonial picture book of monochromatic, grainy images, Grand Tour could have remained a palimpsest travelogue of a British civil servant on the run, but through its journey, it evolves into an act of immersion into the realm of the Southeast Asian landscapes–in terms of its observation of human lives and nature.
Spoilers Ahead
Technique–a Character
The film begins with the voice of a Burmese narrator and with a set of pictures–disjointed, in sequence, an authentic testament to the Western lens. Through the disjointed images, narration, and the director’s vision, we meet our protagonist, Edward, a British civil servant on the run on his wedding night. He broke off his seven years’ engagement, leaving only a telegram that said he had urgent work commitments. Confronted with his fiancée’s cousin after the first leg of his journey, he escapes again. The first half of the film follows Edward’s grand tour and triggers a long, dreamlike chase across Southeast Asia through its powerful images of culture and human lives.
What does a Grand Tour entail for a White Man?
Grand Tour –The title references the 18th–19th-century European tradition where upper-class men traveled through foreign lands to gain culture and experience. There are countless images of the ‘living’ in Burma, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, and China that reek of an unmistakable chapter of colonial history. Gomes subverts this idea, turning the “grand tour” into a fevered escape and, later on, a meditation on what it means to travel. Gomes doesn’t tell this story in a linear way. Instead, he blends cinema with real-world documentary footage, studio reconstructions, voiceover readings, and silent images. The film is shot partly in black-and-white, evoking the look of early cinema, and partly in contemporary color footage, shifting time to indicate the White man’s eye and the contemporary Southeast-Asia rooted in the real. The colonial past is overlaid on the present.
Edward’s Map of Infinite Sadness
Edward’s journey isn’t forward-moving in any heroic sense; instead, it is a desperate, almost dreamlike retreat from the reality of his failures. We follow him on a journey which first takes him to Singapore. In its technique, the film overflows Edward’s lens. The images of street markets, riverside villages, karaoke bars, and Buddhist rituals is the film’s refusal to stay inside his world. The visuals form a counter-narrative to Edward’s solipsistic lens, revealing the pluralist, living Southeast Asia outside his confines. The film does not adhere to time-space unity in a loyal manner–in fact, it finds a mischievous pacing, jumping cities and sometimes just gazing onto images of street vendors, musicians playing lazily, or puppet shows telling allegorical stories. Gomes uses visual dissonance as we move from Myanmar to Vietnam to Japan with little narrative explanation. The method mirrors Edward’s psychological disorientation as he flees from Molly.
Grand Tour only loosely follows Edward’s itinerary as he jumps cities from Rangoon, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka and beyond. He catches a fever, spends time travelling on a fishermen’s boat, and makes sojourns during the journey. To loosely track Edward’s journey, let’s follow the map of physical places he visits before his narrative fades into silence. Edward flees his wedding to Molly from Rangoon, British Burma and goes into hiding in Singapore. From there, he goes to the port in Dawei (Myanmar coast) and boards a ship, beginning his journey across Southeast-Asia. He visits Bangkok, Thailand, where his sadness deepens and he starts feeling alienated, which is shown through chaotic urban footage contrasted with the disengaged narration. Disillusioned, he disappears into the forests and riverways of Cambodia, witnessing folk rituals and scenes of rural life untouched by the city. His next stop is again a city–Singapore, which appears in its postcolonial incarnation—vibrant, chaotic, indifferent. He flees Saigon and reaches Japan. The encounter with the Komuso Monks here is a turning point for Edward that changes the trajectory of his journey, dissolving it into a spiritual silence.
The Komuso Monks:
The Komuso monks are religious figures from Japanese history, known for wearing a straw basket over their heads that covers their faces. These monks observed anonymity for spiritual reasons. Meeting with the Komuso Monks would be a perspective shift for Edward in the film as the Komusō’s faceless presence—a figure who refuses identity, ego, or speech—contrasts sharply with Edward’s dramatized, conscious gaze. The Komuso Monks ask Edward to go to the mountain and see how the monkeys live. If Edward is running from the weight of being seen, the Komuso monks propose another way of being: disintegration. In a way, this is a lifestyle that foreshadows both the protagonists’ fates as they disappear into the landscape. Prompted by the monk, Edward surrenders himself to the otherworldly exotic landscape, giving up his White man’s dramatized lens.
On the Road– Infinite Sadness vs. Endless Passion
The second half of the film follows Molly Singleton–the seven-year fiancée who came to Rangoon from London to marry Edward, but he left her cold and escaped the city. In sheer disbelief at the idea that Edward could have left her at the altar, she embarks on her own quest to find her fiancé. Edward’s journey was inspired by escape, but Molly’s is motivated by desire. There is a sequence in Edward’s journey where he wakes up in a village to the tune of a “strange string instrument called the gaquin”–the consul explains that the tune is known as Infinite Sadness in their village, and Endless Passion in the next village over. Although following the same path in Edward’s stead, Molly’s travel is one motivated by Endless Passion.
Molly’s Endless Passion and Where it Leads:
Initially, Molly’s journey seems like an afterthought of Edward’s. The bride left at the altar, desperate to find her husband. Molly is peculiar by 19th-century standards, her acceptance of Edward’s abandonment rooted in such disbelief that it looks self-deprecating and like a disgrace to onlookers. Her humor, odd and not like a lady’s. Perhaps these are seeds that would bloom into the journey she embarks on. From retracing Edward’s steps out of desperation, she starts experiencing lapses where her eyes are on a desire for meaning. In doing so, she begins to observe the familiar world differently, and we do too. There is a stark shift in visual storytelling from grainy photographs interspersed with real footage, to a cohesive, linear format of storytelling in Molly’s half of the film. The shift is also one in the characterization–the White man has been replaced by a woman–a subversion as such that where Edward saw chaos and threat, Molly saw life. In Saigon, she smiles, eats street food, and listens to women talk. In Cambodia, she is moved by gestures, not haunted by ghosts. Her journey is on the other side of the grand tour: it is not a collection of colonial-era images or horrid ‘other’ experiences, but a gradual disappearance in the realest landscapes of South Asia. To loosely follow Molly’s map, we begin from Hotel Raffles in Singapore, where Molly meets with Reggie Singleton, the cousin who Edward met too. Reggie’s dissuasions have no effect on Molly, and she embarks on a ship full of strange companions. We follow her tracks through Singapore, where she observes, listens, and engages with local life in a way that elevates her quest from being on the lookout for a stray fiancé, to searching for a deeper meaning. We wonder whether Molly’s story is at all dissimilar to a single woman living in contemporary times torn between similar choices?
Molly meets with a cattle rancher called Sanders on the boat. Her arrival in Thailand is dramatic–a train derails, and she meets a woman called Lady Dragon sitting by the rail tracks, smoking. When Molly expresses why she is travelling, Lady Dragon says that she hates men. “You like girls, then?” Molly enquiries and Lady Dragon says that she loves flowers–going on to recite the exotic-sounding names of different flower breeds in the air. This makes us recall the bunch of flowers that Edward gave away–a motif strongly tied to the man and the marriage, and the mention of flowers by Lady Dragon–a motif strangely liberating and contrasting its previous mention.
Molly’s Quest Within
While Edward’s journey consisted of a singular gaze, a singular fate, Molly’s journey is about tapping into the collective and then looking inwards. In Saigon, she meets Sanders and finds herself within a community. A distraction from her quest emerges–her singular motive of finding her fiancé is replaced by a quiet plurality–of people, places, and cultures. She befriends Ngoc, a household helper in Sander’s home, who tells that when she can love many men, why give all the love to one? Meanwhile, Sanders is enamored by Molly and makes advances towards marrying her. In a leisurely conversation with Ngoc, Molly learns about a religious High Priestess of the three worlds who guided Ngoc to go south and find her destiny. Molly asks Ngoc to take her to a priestess, leaning more into the spiritual depth of her arc of meaning and self-discovery. The Eastern spirituality, foretold through the priestess that Ngoc and Molly visits, becomes a beacon guiding Molly’s journey. She is no longer tied to her singular pursuit but is, in fact, being guided by her journey. The priestess tells her two things: that she is going to die, but there is a spirit beside her (Ngoc?), and that she is the beloved of two men–one of them is a rich man who loves her, and the other is in a big city by the river in China. Molly leaves a letter to Sanders that she is not one to give up on her mission–she has left for China, but with Ngoc by her side. This is a beautiful turn–plural, female, and relying on a camaraderie built while travelling. The nature of Molly’s quest has changed into a more introspective journey with the agency of forging your own path.
The Last Rites:
Molly’s final journey upriver through China is almost like a pilgrimage full of resplendent symbols of spirituality and religion. A river’s symbolic passage has often flown into afterlives, like the Ganges like the Styx. The shift to China starts off in a Jazzy, jocular way–with footage of a contemporary band playing alongside the narrator describing Molly’s individual journey upriver. It soon cuts to a somber image in monochrome, of a group of unclothed men pulling the boat. The boat journeys onwards even when the currents are not in favor. In this journey, a bishop joins the group, and we soon learn he is leaving his faith to go back to Yorkshire and live a civilian life. The bishop answers the question that Molly has started to ask herself: Should one give up on the conviction of their lifetime? Their last journey reaches a tumultuous, stormy night–like the final act of Eliot’s Wasteland–and the men die in a boat wreck. Ngoc sobs endlessly, until Molly pushes her for the last leg of their journey. Perhaps they all died that night. The continuation is only a sublime extension, one that the director keeps for the audience and their closure. As the final turn in their journey, Molly and Ngoc reach a village–misty, liminal, where Indigenous people in White men’s clothes are waiting to be executed. The landscape looks like a blur between the ideas of heaven and hell– and that is the question that the film asks: Did Molly reach paradise or fall into a descent?
Death and Beyond– What Does it Mean?
Molly walks away from the village–she does not have to face the brutal outcome that her journey led to. It is almost as if the kindness of the landscape gives her an alternate ending. She enters a forest–we see a last monochromatic image of it–and asks Ngoc to sing a swansong. As Ngoc sings, the image shifts to a landscape of color; the story we followed through in Molly’s gaze is replaced by real-life images of Southeast Asia. Ngoc and Molly’s deaths are quiet. Molly’s death by freezing blends her into the landscape–a landscape that spills the outline of the narrators’ gazes of the film. This self-erasure is not loss, but a kind of spiritual surrender. She allows herself to be changed by the landscape instead of mapping it any longer.
In Edward’s footage, Southeast Asia is captured with a documentarian’s eye—but still through a colonial lens: fetishized, fragmented, distant. Molly’s upriver journey, in contrast, refuses to objectify or dominate what it sees. Her presence is absorbed into the landscape, ending the observation that Grand Tour is. There is one last director’s masterclass in how the camera zooms out to crew members, focusing on dead Molly’s face. A director’s nod to how technique plays a role in the film, the meta-ending observes the space between narrative and form.
