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.)
Grand Tour's counterpoint of the real and the manufactured, the past as exists in imagination and the present as captured, is not meant to expose Edward and Molly. It's not cynical. Nor is it intellectually judgemental. Instead, it's playful, unglamorous and self-aware. In fact, all films by Gomes flirt with a formal investigation where reality and filmmaking merges, often through the lens of history. And here the film also hints -- or hoodwinks -- at the tradition of travelogue films and the picturesque aesthetics of early cinema.
In the late 19th century, a "travelogue" was a live lecture-show in which a traveller-narrator described foreign and exotic lands (or colonies) to ticketed audiences, using photographic images from magic lanterns to illustrate his talks. The celebrity speaker of the period was Burton Holmes, from Chicago, who delivered over 8,000 travel-lectures throughout his career -- some accounts credit him as the one who coined the term "travelogue".
In 1897, two years after the birth of cinema, Holmes was the first person to incorporate motion pictures of landscapes and scenic shots in his lectures, and thus the term "travelogue" also applied to travel films.
Gonçalo Waddington in Grand Tour.
Alongside the travelogue tradition is the concept of "the cinematic picturesque". Something that looks like a picture on the screen -- a representation of a place, but never the real place. Jennifer Lynn Peterson's studies of early travel films note that in the early 20th century,
"Films were often titled with that word: Picturesque Andalusia, Picturesque India, etc." She comments further: "The critical consensus today is that the picturesque is politically retrograde. The picturesque relentlessly aestheticised the world".
Edward and Molly's journey in Grand Tour, inspired by Somerset Maugham's diary, is set in the same decade that travel films and the picturesque were popular in Europe and the US. Their destinations also overlap with some of Holme's itinerary when a century ago he travelled through Southeast Asia, including to Siam.
But Gomes' version of the picturesque is stylised to give nods to early cinema, while his use of voice-over in actual local languages (Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog, etc), even though all British characters speak Portuguese (this is a Portuguese film), gives Grand Tour a self-conscious, oddball, wilfully anachronistic air. The film's wry, playful deconstruction of the Orientalist gaze occupies that delightful space between romanticism and authenticity.
Tourism is a march of stupidity, said Don DeLillo. That might not apply to Edward in 1917, but it does in 2025 to most characters in The White Lotus Season 3, another work recently shot in Thailand. In form and intent, Mike White's HBO series couldn't be more dissimilar from Gomes' experimental-minded Grand Tour. But it's opportune that both are now available to watch in Thailand. And from the viewpoint of those who call it home, each of them is meticulously choreographed to offer its own vision of this country.
The White Lotus Season 3 is the first in the series to take place in the so-called Global South -- that is, a developing nation (Season 1 is in Hawaii and Season 2 in Sicily). In a way, it hardly matters where the location is: the engine of The White Lotus' satire is about puncturing the bubble inhabited by its white, uber-rich, overprivileged American characters insulated in their wealth and ignorance. No matter where they go -- they obviously prefer luxury beach paradise -- these casually offensive, self-absorbed, humorously obnoxious people still live in their own befuddled heads. Right up until that paradise is lost, usually at the end of each season (we have one more episode to go as you're reading this).
At its most banal, however, The White Lotus looks like another Tourism Authority of Thailand advert. The series has too many formulaic images -- gorgeous beaches, party islands, sweat-splattered muay Thai arenas, the giant Buddha at Wat Pak Nam, Chinatown at night, serene monasteries and wise monks whose spiritual guidance can redeem soulless American Gen Z-ers and greedy capitalists from First-World overindulgence. The use of catchy Thai pop tunes is an adorable localisation touch, but sometimes it's just too much and irrelevant. Meanwhile, local characters lack depth (granted, we still have the final episode). In Season 2, from the get-go we marvel at the celebratory free-spiritedness of the two Sicilian prostitutes Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Granno) -- they're meaningful characters that put perspectives to the broad satirical romp.
Those beaches, canals and temples are the representational images we've seen before in other foreign films shot in Thailand, from Emmanuelle (1974) to The Beach (2000) and The Hangover Part II (2011). Of course, we also had Burton Holmes' travelogues long before that, even though travelling, not tourism, meant a different thing back then.
But let's turn this around a couple of degrees. To The White Lotus' defence, these are the images everyone wants to see. And what everyone wants to see is a raison d'etre of streaming content. Thai people love it when we're portrayed as a paradise destination, breathtaking, fun, trouble-free and mystical, with just the right amount of petty danger (snakes, drugs). Westerners love it too, because it is soothing to the eyes and the mind. And narratively speaking, this is the Thailand that exists in the heads of the series' characters.
At its most sly, The White Lotus is aware that what the audience is seeing is not Thailand. It's the image of Thailand, the exalted idea of Thailand, a selected representation constructed out of imagination, lies, clichéd Buddhism, myth, fantasy, state propaganda, official narratives, Instagram, Condé Nast Traveler, images from other films, with some truth thrown into that mad mix. Frank, the Sam Rockwell character, understands this completely. If the series had pushed this cynical reading further, we'd have a Hollywood companion of the European Grand Tour.
From time to time, The White Lotus adopts an inverted gaze that looks back into the bubble and sniggers. When Victoria Ratliff, the North Carolinian martriarch played with twangy disdain by Parker Posey, drops that "Why do you want to live in Taiwan?" joke in Episode 5, the loudest laugh -- the knowing laugh -- comes from us, the Thais, because that's our joke. That's what has made us laugh, or sneer, at geographically-challenged farang for years. That joke implies that The White Lotus attempts to be one of us, and yet it knows that it can never be, or loses interest to be along the way.
It's a paradoxical take -- idolising yet teasing, exoticising and yet hesitant. The picturesque seems to win out in the end. The 21st-century parlance for these landscape shots is not "picturesque", as it was in the days of Burton Holmes in the 1910s, but "Instagrammable", "Tiktokable", or "viral-worthy". They're images of paradise, especially when you look up from Earth, or from hell, or from North Carolina.
With murder bookending every season of The White Lotus, whether it's Hawaii, Taormina or Koh Samui, we know that a tropical holiday will inevitably come to an end. The illusion cannot hold. Reality always triumphs. In Miguel Gomes' 2012 film Tabu, a tragic love story set in a Portuguese colony in Africa, there is one part titled Paradise Lost. It's both a description and a prophecy, because all paradises are doomed to implode and burst into flames.
Grand Tour is in selected Thai cinemas. The White Lotus streams on HBO Max.
