Miguel Gomes: "Making movies is an excuse to get out of the house"

BarcelonaThe day before he married his wife, the director Miguel Gomes (Lisbon, 1972) read him a passage from Somerset Maugham's travel book The gentleman in the parlour (1930), in which the author describes the encounter in Burma with an Englishman who is making a famous route through Southeast Asia (the so-called Grand Tour) to escape his promise and the prosperous marriage it represents. That this story about a groom on the run has ended up becoming the new film by the director of Taboo and Arabian Nights It says a lot about his sense of humour and his absolutely free and fabulating conception of cinema. "Fiction exists precisely to create parallel lives that are less boring than mine," says Gomes, who in the film Grand tour –Cannes Best Director Award– first follows the melancholic Edward's journey through Southeast Asia and then switches point of view to narrate how Molly searches for him in Rangoon, Bangkok, Saigon, the Philippines...

Filmed in a studio and set in 1917, this love story Grand tour, now in theaters, which intersperses Edward and Molly's travels with contemporary documentary segments recorded in the same cities of the Grand Tour: ancient puppet shows, a Ferris wheel powered by men risking their necks, a man who sings My way in a karaoke... These are images of a vibrant force, a purity reminiscent of those films by the Lumière camera operators who traveled the world at the end of the 19th century.

Gomes and his team captured these images along a rugged grand tour which, due to the pandemic, was completed without the director's physical presence. "I felt that in order to make the film we had to first follow the same route as the characters," explains Gomes. "In fact, we wrote the script for the 1917 story afterwards; it seemed important to me to react to what was happening in the contemporary world." That the film forced the director to embark on a journey through Asia was a welcome gift. "For me, making films is a pretext to live, to leave home," he admits. "I'm not interested in capturing my everyday life. I want to film life, but not my life. I need to be fascinated by something and want to film it. And from that fascination, invent a story."

Violent Associations

In Grand tour There are antagonistic elements in abundance: past and present, fiction and documentary, colour and black and white photography... The logic behind this comes from Gomes' interest in creating unexpected relationships with the audience. "Putting two opposing elements on the screen creates a clash in the viewer's head, a violence that will produce a third thing depending on their gaze and their ideas," he explains. "Basically, my job is to organise the film as if it were an architectural space where the viewer can walk around and do different things, so that the film is also different."

The director attributes the risk and freedom of his films to the absence of a strong film industry in Portugal: "So few films are made that there is no money, so we take advantage of the lack of industrial pressure to make more personal films with a very cinephile identity." A filmmaker with whom he shares a cinephile and whom Gomes greatly admires is Albert Serra, with whom he will coincide this weekend at the box office, since Grand tour and Afternoons of solitude They will be released on the same day. "For me, Albert is an example of personal cinema in a contemporary context," says the Portuguese.