A man in 1917 gets cold feet and flees his fiancée following the route of the Grand Tour: Rangoon, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai, and then up the Yangtze River. But while Edward travels, he encounters those cities in the present day, the cities’ current inhabitants showing us those vibrant cities now (sometimes in monochrome, sometimes in color). It’s a strikingly brilliant device, and it refuses to look at those cities through old early twentieth century orientalist modes of tourism.
(Amazingly, Edward and Molly’s two journeys are narrated in Burmese, then Thai, then Vietnamese, Tagalog, Japanese, Mandarin. This is a film where all the English characters speak Portuguese as if that’s their native language, but sometimes carry on conversations in flawless French without even remarking on the difference. It’s very very clever.)
First as tragedy, then as farce. For the film’s second half (and if you’ve seen a Gomes film before, you were probably expecting this) we switch to Molly, as she chases her fiancé through these cities and finally up the Yangtze. Her story is completely different, and she has an extraordinarily different approach. Her trip also takes much, much, longer.
This is fascinating from start to finish. It is (as some have noted) difficult to attach emotionally to the two central characters, but this is about cities and Asia and colonialism and life, not about story. It’s about the journey, as a self-help guru might say.
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