Last year’s prizes at Cannes ended up as field guide to the 2025 Academy Awards. Five statuettes in two categories for Emilia Pérez. A screenplay gong for The Substance. Palme d’Or to the eventual Oscars top dog, Anora. Best actor went to Jesse Plemons, who wasn’t mentioned much in awards season, but he is unquestionably an American. What’s happened to the old-school art house that used to dominate the French film festival?
Look no further than the winner of best director. Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour is not a forbidding film. Detailing an English woman’s search, in the last year of the first World War, for her jilting fiance across southeast Asia, the film is filled with gags, tunes and off-centre beauty.
But it is also properly strange in a way you don’t get from the mainstream. For starters, the two lead performers speak all their lines in Portuguese. This is not because the actors can manage only their native tongue. Gonçalo Waddington, who plays Edward, and Crista Alfaiate, charming as Molly – two of Portugal’s busiest actors – speak English as well as I do, it turns out. I wonder, were they altering their own accents towards British inflections?
“It’s like when you’re playing Shakespeare in Portuguese – or, I don’t know, Pinter or Chekhov,” Waddington says. “There are a lot of names. Maybe your name is Alexei. Maybe your name is Hamlet or whatever. Here, after a few minutes, people say, ‘Edward is English, Molly is English.’ We never played them as British in terms of accent. It is just the most straightforward Portuguese possible.”
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With a name like Waddington, I imagine the actor must have some English heritage.
“It’s from my grandmother,” he says. “She was half-British and half-French. And they lived between Zimbabwe and South Africa and Mozambique. And then they came back. So my name comes from that part of the family.”
Why am I even asking these questions? We accepted the fact that Charlton Heston didn’t speak Aramaic in Ben Hur. Waddington laughs and remembers a famous anecdote about the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.
“Somebody said they would like to do the music for that film. He said, ‘Well, it’s in a boat. So where’s the music coming from?’ And the other guy said, ‘So where’s the camera?‘”
The point that Hugo Friedhofer, ultimately musical director of Lifeboat, was making is that all film-making is artifice and convention. Gomes, the Portuguese master behind previous masterpieces such as Arabian Nights, from 2015, and Tabu, from 2012, has no shame in pressing home the argument throughout Grand Tour. Inspired by the work of W Somerset Maugham, this tale of late colonialism in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines is singular in tone, form and construction.
The first part follows Edward, engaged to Molly for seven years, as he, panicked when her boat threatens to reach him in Rangoon, flees for Singapore and the territories mentioned above. The discrete second part follows Molly as she sets off in pursuit. That historical action, all filmed on a soundstage, is intercut with documentary footage of the corresponding present-day countries that Gomes shot in advance as Covid was setting in.
“We knew that everything that was shot outside the studio would be nowadays,” Alfaiate says. “Everything that was inside the studio would be in a different time. But we were not super focused on that. We had seen the footage. So we could relate to those countries and those places. But we were thinking about the way we could get to the next scene. Can I say ‘parkour’?”
I think a comparison with that roof-hopping pursuit, in which participants seek the shortest way between two points, works nicely for a film that takes us on the most unlikely journeys. Important issues are being teased here. The contemporary footage reminds us how artificial were the colonial arrangements, with their pink gins, complacent verandas and poorly concealed exploitations. The Eton Boating Song makes an unlikely appearance in the action.
But the film is always sparky and entertaining. Emerging from the first screenings, everyone was equally puzzled and delighted by Molly’s bizarre laugh. It’s something between a splutter and a guffaw.
“Between snorting and also blowing with your lips?” Waddington suggests.
“We had a lot of improvisation for that,” Alfaiate says. “So I tried 1,025 things. And really out of tiredness this came. It was perfect for all those situations. Eventually, we found something that was not obvious for an English lady at that time. But us not speaking in English is connected in the same logic. Molly maybe wouldn’t laugh like that, but we found a specific way of her to be and to laugh. It had to be specific for this character.”
Alfaiate and Waddington have history with Gomes. They were both in Cannes for his epic, three-part, 383-minute variation on the Arabian Nights. As with Tabu, that trilogy saw the director again processing intellectual concerns through a playful facade.
The process is part of the game. There is a sense that the main body of Grand Tour is a commentary on the “grand tour” that Gomes himself made before returning to the studio. Can we get away with calling him an experimental film-maker? It does feel as if the current project evolved through a process of investigation.
Waddington, himself a film-maker, mentions an encounter with the director of the recent Oscar winner I’m Still Here.
“I was in Brazil – in São Paulo on a jury – and I met Walter Salles there,” he says. “Salles is friends with Miguel, and he knows Crista. He called Miguel’s films the ‘cinema of invention’. He is always inventing or creating. It has to a lot of to do with form – I mean the way you tell the story. Obviously, the content and story itself are always very beautiful and very subtle. But I think he’s quite right when he says the cinema of invention.”
Following the death of Manoel de Oliveira, in 2015, Gomes competes with the more austere Pedro Costa for the title of Portugal’s most celebrated director. I wonder if the win at Cannes last year brought him the acclaim he deserves. Or is his talent a tad too rarefied for that?
“I think most countries, or all the countries, are the same,” Waddington says. “I don’t know if you have the saying, but here in Portugal we have a saying, which I think is international, that when you’re a priest, you’re never ... What is it?”
I think the version here is “a prophet is never appreciated in his own land”.
“Exactly. You are never a prophet in your own land,” he agrees. “So I really think that within the community of cinema in Portugal – I mean directors, actors, editors – he’s very well received and he’s very respected. But as far as the people that go to movies ...
“When we opened the movie here in Portugal at the Cinemateca, he introduced it to everyone. He said a lot of things. And the last thing he said was, ‘Don’t get your hopes. It’s still a Portuguese movie. I may have won best director at Cannes. But it’s still a Portuguese movie.’ Ha ha!”
That rings all kinds of bells. Portugal is a larger country than Ireland – but, with about 10 million people, not that much larger. There is still sometimes a sense out there, unjust though it may be, that “proper films” come from big nations with bossy film industries. (In anglophone territories that is still, to an extent, a lengthy way of saying “Hollywood”.)
“I think Portuguese cinema still has this beautiful heritage,” Alfaiate says. “The sense of freedom, of experimentation. That’s kind of central to Portuguese cinema. Miguel really is very assertive in keeping that freedom in creating his film. It is not connected to mass production.”
Still, they got to go on quite a journey with (appropriately) Grand Tour last May. Cannes is a strange affair. You make a film on a small budget. You are uncompromising. And you still end up at the centre of that publicity maelstrom.
“You see the limousines and the red carpets and the dresses and the jewellery,” Waddington says. “That’s just for movies. That’s just so that movies can be bought and seen. And that is amazing. The really overwhelming feeling was that this is a country that spends a lot of money to promote cinema. That is amazing.”
Grand Tour is on Mubi from Friday, April 18th
