‘Grand Tour’ Review: Miguel Gomes’ Sprawling Travelogue Traverses Space and Time

Cannes 2024: The Portuguese auteur fascinates and frustrates in this meandering and melancholic film

grand-tour
"Grand Tour" (Cannes Film Festival)

How much can we expect cinema to be fully legible? If history, culture, and existence itself are not so easily parsed, why should the films we make about them be? Is navigating this chaotic life not defined by the both wondrous and wearisome waves of the world crashing over us? 

If there was ever a film to capture this, it would be the spellbinding though scattered “Grand Tour” from director Miguel Gomes. His latest is an expansive, sweeping work that bends time, space, genre,and form. It is a wholly uncompromising experience that dances with mirth and melancholy. Proving to be evocative in one moment and unrelentingly exhausting in the next, it’s as gorgeous to behold visually as it is hard to completely embrace thematically.

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