GRAND TOUR

Miguel Gomes (Silver Giraldillo for Arabian Nights) was named best director at Cannes with this film, inspired by a book by Somerset Maugham and his own marriage to Maureen Fazendeiro (The Tsugua Diaries). In the context of the Great War and the twilight of imperialism, a British official based in Burma jilts his fiancée, who refuses to give up and follows him across the continent. A journey through contemporary Asia filmed as archival footage, and dazzling studio sequences recreating bamboo forests and snow-capped temples, “remotely” interweave in this melodrama with a screwball comedy premise. The typically Gomesian interplay between realism and artifice only heightens the allure of this intoxicating odyssey, which revels in the asynchrony of romance and cinema – one of the many reasons we will adore the seventh art until death do us part (from it).