PARADISE LOST

The playfully picturesque Grand Tour and the paradoxical White Lotus, two works of dissimilar temperaments offering their own visions of Thailand

- STORY: KONG RITHDEE

In Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes' beguiling travelogue set in 1917, a British diplomat in Burma journeys across Southeast Asia, hopping from country to country, to avoid an encounter with his fiancée. Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is a colonial officer who, struck by an inexplicable premonition or a case of cold feet, decides to flee Mandalay just before his sweetheart Molly (Crista Alfaiate) is due to arrive. He boards a ship to Singapore, then a train to Bangkok it derails on the way, but still makes it and onwards to Saigon, Manila, Osaka and Chongqing. Molly, pursuing him, would repeat a more or less similar route.

How Gomes structures the couple's grand tour is a point of cinematic historicism and decolonial filmmaking. All the scenes showing Edward's excursion are shot on soundstages in Rome. No real locations are seen in this part of the film, even the train derailment was set up indoors. Thus the Asia Edward experiences is entirely artificial - melancholic, enchanting, beautiful - a dreamlike, black-and-white composite of invention.

However, this fiction of story, places and peoples are intercut with black-and-white documentary footage of those same cities in the present. In this part we see the real streets, communities, landscapes, scenery, puppet shows, faces of people. We see Wat Arun and all the boats in the Chao Phraya.

If the genial Edward exists in a kind of fantasy of the East and we're rollicking along with him, the film's eccentric stratagem ensures that reality always pinches us awake. (The 1917 scenes were shot by Rui Pocas; the documentary part by Thailand's own Sayumbhu Mukdeeprom.)