Screen Grabs: Despite fabulous international locations, ‘Grand Tour’ gives interior anti-epic

With xenophobia on the rise in many forms, it is a good moment to remember that travel is indeed broadening—even if it increasingly might also look like a bad moment to actually travel. Spontaneity on the road is also a plus, as new people and places encountered on the spur of the moment often turn out to the best experiences. But for the protagonists in several new movies this week, unintended adventures prove considerably more bittersweet, sometimes even downright perilous.

Nothing at all is planned by Grand Tour (opens Fri/11 at the Roxie; begins streaming April 15 on MUBI) characters in this latest by the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, whose prior features (including a trilogy updating the Arabian Nights) were equally unclassifiable mixes of narrative enigma, political-historical critique, and the faintly fantastical. Here, we are introduced to what initially seems a fish-out-of-water “exotic” period piece redolent of Werner Herzog and Raul Ruiz. In 1918, Edward Abbot (Gonçalo Waddington) is a handsome diplomatic representative of the British crown in colonial Rangoon. After a seven-year separation, his fiancee is due to arrive from London today. But for whatever reason, Edward impulsively flees that meeting—boarding a steamer bound for Singapore, then going on to Manila, Osaka, and more. Far from being dismayed by his abandonment, newly arrived Molly (Crista Alfaiate) is amused, and gives chase by following his crooked trail throughout Southeast Asia, greatly enjoying her exposure to wholly unfamiliar landscapes and cultures.

But this eccentric B&W fancy-dress tale is interwoven with color footage of the same locations today, with no pretense of hiding up-to-the-moment auto traffic or dress. That documentary element frames Grand Tour’s central narrative as a sort of fable about a colonized past whose lingering traces may largely be invisible now, but are permanent nonetheless.

At the midway point, Molly becomes an onscreen presence rather than just a concept—in fact, she takes over the role of protagonist from Edward, whose flight from commitment (or whatever it is he’s escaping) grows ever more diffuse. The film itself, too, evolves from picaresque comedy to something meditative, a journey whose destination becomes more vague, perhaps even beside the point.

Despite its geographic sprawl, this is ultimately a sort of anti-epic, traversing mental interior rather than exterior physical space. Its idiosyncrasies (which include multinational characters primarily speaking Portuguese) can be flummoxing, but they’re clearly in service to an assertive auteur’s vision… whose meanings or lack thereof will have to be sorted out by each viewer. While I didn’t wholly grok Grand Tour, there is no question that it’s exactly the kind of singular artistic leap you have to be grateful somebody, anybody is still taking these days.

Adventures of a strictly involuntary kind are had by the abducted unfortunates at the center of two more new movies. In Congolese director Jean Luc Herbulot’s Zero (opens in theaters nationwide on Fri/11 simultaneous with release to On Demand platforms; local venues were TBA at press time), two very different American men—a slick investment banker (Hus Miller, who co-wrote the script) and an ex-military roughneck (Cam McHarg)—wake from drugged naps to find bombs strapped to their chests, cell phones in their hands. The only person calling is a voice—one that’s rather too-identifiably Willem Dafoe’s—telling them they have 10 hours to complete five “missions.” If they don’t, they will go boom. Those tasks involve much running around Dakar, eventually meeting up with and disliking each other, eluding police, making new short-term alliances, and unknowingly setting up other people to die. Of course the big question is “Why?” They’ll eventually get an answer, albeit not one they necessarily want.

That answer ties this frenetic action movie to chaotic Third World politics and historic, ongoing First World exploitation—a big-picture message not ideally served by the preceding 80 minutes or so of gimmicky, wiseass, bullet-riddled hyperbole. I liked Herbulot’s 2021 Saloum, which stuffed a different genre melange (including supernatural horror) full of political commentary to more potent effect. But this time his flashiness overwhelms any substance. This is the sort of exercise in snarky machismo and ADD-accommodating stylistic overkill you’d normally expect to find Jason Statham bouncing around in. It’s well-crafted for what it is, but the video-game-like result feels self-congratulatory and hollow. 

Much less hyperactive is The Accidental Getaway Driver (now streaming on Apple TV, Amazon, and Fandango after a small theatrical release that bypassed the Bay Area), a first feature from Brit Sing J. Lee. Nonetheless, its premise is no picnic for Long Ma (Hiep Tran Nghia), an elderly Vietnamese immigrant still toiling as a rideshare driver in Orange County. Reluctantly taking a late-night call, he finds himself the hostage of three escaped convicts (Dustin Nguyen, Dali Benssalah, Phi Vu). Their plan almost immediately begins to unravel, setting them against each other as well as a police manhunt and their unwilling chauffeur.

As this forced alliance drags on, Long Ma finds himself unexpectedly bonding with Nguyen’s Tay, the only other Vietnamese speaker here. There is some poignance in that quasi-paternal relationship, which fills a need both their hard-luck lives (we see flashbacks to Ma’s distant homeland past during the “American War”) previously denied them. But this gracefully made film’s rewards don’t fully compensate for its slow pacing and under-plotted script.

Two more new movies find characters taken on wild rides of a more psychological ilk. In Indonesian writer-director Makbul Mubarak’s feature debut Autobiography (available via arthouse streaming platform Film Movement as of Fri/11), unassuming youth Kib (Kevin Ardilova) is employed as housekeeper-security for a rural mansion whose wealthy owners are seldom in residence. One day retired General Purna (Arswendy Bening Swara) shows up unexpected and alone, planning to launch a local political campaign while his wife and other family members remain elsewhere.

He takes Kib—whose father is imprisoned, and brother working abroad—under his wing, so that when some of his boss’s election banners get vandalized, the young man happily tracks down the culprits. But he doesn’t reckon with the severity of Purna’s retribution, which underlines the vast gulf in privilege, corruption, and exploitation between them. This beautifully shot widescreen drama is quiet, unhurried yet taut, drawing maximum impact from a relatively simple story and minimal dialogue.

Also getting considerably more than he bargained for from a self-appointed mentor is John Magano as Keane, an NYC writer whose second novel isn’t proceeding so well in Turkish director Tolga Karacelik’s English-language debut Psycho Therapy (opening on Fri/11, Karacelik’s film did not have any confirmed Bay Area venues at press time [check for updates here] and releases to On Demand platforms the same day). He isn’t turning out pages, his agent (Ward Horton) is unenthused about the concept, and wife Suzie (Britt Lower) is fed up—with Keane in general, and being married to him in particular. Truth told, he is a little insufferable. His ever-fragile ego gets a boost when he’s approached by a professed “big fan of your work,” Kollmick (Steve Buscemi). Then it turns out that in fact this older man wants Keane to write about him, a “retired serial killer” who quit “before I got caught.” He’s willing to share the secrets of his, er, trade for the sake of a discreetly veiled biographical tome.

Unfortunately this association gets misinterpreted—seeing her husband suddenly accrue so much research material about murder, Susie thinks he wants to kill her. (Not that she hasn’t pondered the reverse.) She begins to spy on him, leading to an extended climax at a hotel that looks like the one in Barton Fink. There, several unfortunate bystanders risk drawing Kollmick out of retirement.

Psycho Therapy is a droll black comedy that’s a little on the pokey side; it has some good ideas, but could have executed them with more energy. Still, it’s diverting to see Buscemi playing the senior role in a kind of offbeat indie buddy flick he’s done before—notably, 33 years ago in Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup, where he was the aspiring young artist taken for a bewildering spin around the mental block by Seymour Cassel’s invasive patron.