At first I did not know how to watch the fresh and giggling, gasp-of-delight-inducing, omnivorous, often deliberately pointless, even trolling and irritating movies of Miguel Gomes, who has been lauded as one of contemporary cinema’s most original political filmmakers. What confounded me wasn’t that his works were particularly dull or unentertaining—it’s that they were often both dull and entertaining. Born in 1972, Gomes has created an anti-sensuous cinema across six feature films, in which his wondrously excessive deployment of voiceover and juxtaposition erode, usurp, and replace scenes, characters, and story. Yet his work poses different challenges from those of the contemporary art film.

Rather than drawing you deeper into a corporeal world, his slowness feels more like a glacial whimsy. Gomes’s vaguely Nouvelle Vague prankster sensibility is devoted to both creating and dousing that most central affect of movie-making, fun. Gomes loves pop songs, beautiful people, and also long stretches where nothing happens. While his underlying plots can resemble melodramas, he neutralizes their steamy content into zones of productive boredom, a silly boredom that forces you to create inferences between his unrelated, potentially unrewarding storylines. This boredom is not a spiritually nutritious, Bressonian boredom, but the byproduct of a kind of playful failure. A Gomes film is an experiment, the work of someone trying stuff out and not too bothered if things don’t work out. This is an unorthodox approach for a maker of political films, a morally sober genre that typically seeks to agitate, teach, and inspire.

Gomes’s films do none of these things. Tabu (2012) and Grand Tour (2024) interrogate the colonial history of Africa and Asia. His magnum opus, Arabian Nights (2015), adopts a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of forms to fully represent the economic collapse of Portugal and the crushing of its working class. But these films have little interest in stirring up the feelings of outrage, empathy, and hope that we commonly associate with cinematic agitprop. Juvenile, amoral, and quite carefree about wasting your time, Gomes’s films also open up a horizon of total freedom. They may not treat film primarily as a medium for stories, characters, and ethical certitude, but his works catalyze something else: a porous, unfixed sensation of political joy.

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Can you build a story entirely out of scaffolding? The opening shots of Grand Tour—Gomes’s latest film, which garnered him the Best Director Award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival—are crammed full of it. A man clings to the exterior of a modest Ferris wheel while another uses his hands and legs to propel its rotations. We cut to the first of many puppet shows, then soon after to workers creeping across telephone wires—perhaps they’re marionettes too? Metal frames, puppet strings, and suspended cables: all this armature not so subtly hints that the film will lay bare its narrative construction, just as the puppets suggest that our heroes will function less like a novel’s pulsing protagonists than like board game tokens moved from square to square.

Set the year of the Russian Revolution and the Balfour Declaration, Grand Tour opens upon a British colonial officer, Edward, loitering around on a dock in Mandalay. His fiancée, Molly, is coming to meet him so they can finally get hitched, but Edward gets cold feet and decides to ghost her. So excessive is his lack of commitment that he hightails it across colonial-era Burma, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, and China. Just as the Ferris wheel inevitably revolves back to its starting point, Grand Tour resets and focuses its second half on Molly as she retraces the steps of her runaway groom.

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Crista Alfaiate as Molly and Cláudio da Silva as Timothy Sanders in Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour (2024)

The film retains the marriage plot’s familiar generators of narrative, but Grand Tour isn’t quite the “globe-trotting tale of unrequited love” promised by its marketing. Gomes has declared his antipathy to a psychological approach to character, and he spends much of the film showing something else: seemingly random footage that he and his crew shot throughout pre-Covid Asia of “exotic” nightlife, tropical flora, musical performances, and yes, more puppet shows. Rather delightfully, the voiceover changes language to match the country we’re in, as if God actually spoke 日本語, Tiếng Việt, or မြန်မာဘာသာ.

In this work of flamboyant bricolage, we watch Edward ride a pony through the rainforest, party in hotel ballrooms, or sit cross-legged on a tatami mat imbibing Eastern wisdom, all shot in silvery 16mm black and white—only for the film to cut to, say, a Filipino karaoke singer belting out “My Way.” The Russian scientists of narratology warned us that what a story is about, its fabula, may differ quite extensively from how it’s told, its sjužet—and Gomes happily sabotages his romance storyline using his two favorite weapons, juxtaposition and voiceover. The former crumbles the film apart; the latter stitches it back together, albeit with a bit more slack than a puppet string or an amusement park railing. As the third-person omniscient narration tells us about Edward and Molly’s foibles and tribulations, the actors themselves disappear from the frame, replaced by Vietnamese motorcyclists zipping past to the sounds of the “Blue Danube Waltz” or by a slowly masticating panda.

As if aware of the essential pointlessness of their endeavor, the lead actors perform with a knowing mischief. Gonçalo Waddington’s Edward is handsome, stupefied, and seemingly stuck in a never-ending, laconic hangover. The film’s true star is the spirited Crista Alfaiate, who spent Arabian Nights shapeshifting gloriously from punk activist to Stetson-wearing country girl to Scheherazade herself, whom she played as an effervescent nymph. In Grand Tour her Molly is a wiser and worldlier woman, an effeminate bulldozer. Much of the film seems powered by her giggles, perhaps an expression of incredulity at how little interest the film has in seeing her quest fulfilled.

The ecumenical range of Grand Tour’s documentary footage suggests a voracious desire to drag the news of the world through a wormhole that transmutes fact into fiction and vice-versa. Before long you start reading the quasi-anthropological material of street performers, picturesque fauna, and cityscapes as a metaphor for the film’s fictional love story, shot on ostentatiously artificial soundstages that look stolen from a Powell and Pressburger period piece. The narrator might announce that Edward has boarded a vessel to Vietnam, only for the film to show a present-day speedboat zipping across the Saigon harbor. Are we seeing the speedboat itself (an anachronistic impossibility) or a representation of Edward’s steamship, both metaphor and synecdoche? Meaning bounces back and forth between the movie’s two lanes—narrative feature and documentary travelogue—like a beam of light ricocheting between facing mirrors.

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A scene from Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour (2024)

Gomes’s films set up a perplexing economy of pleasure. All artworks enlist their audiences to help create their meaning, but in Gomes’s case you may feel that you are laboring to produce the enjoyment of his movies, rather than the other way around. As one hater on the social media site Letterboxd put it: “If your film makes me craft my own film in my head and decipher every moment, you better be paying me.” When watching Grand Tour, I sometimes resigned myself to being a disinterested bystander, agnostic in my expectations that something interesting might happen onscreen. As Gomes pulls up the anchors of signification and the film’s concrete objects evaporate into abstractions, the resulting visual collage feels, to borrow the film’s description of Edward as he endures a bout of malaria, “delirious but serene.”

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Watching a Gomes film can give the impression of someone inventing the future of cinema by repurposing its prehistory, as if he were a Looney Tunes character who tears up the railroad tracks behind him and slaps them in front of the train. Grand Tour sometimes revels in the Orient as an almost sepia-tinted land of the past. Pandas, monkeys, and lotus blossoms, street performers bashing the air with their puppets or brandishing martial arts: such ethnographic footage calls to mind the Polynesian dances and rituals depicted in Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), an F.W. Murnau silent from which Gomes borrowed more than the title for his most acclaimed film.

The most obvious template for Grand Tour, his Tabu also derails an accessible love story to gesture at the unspeakable taboo of colonialism underneath everyday life. Drawing on the resources of silent film, novelistic prose, oral storytelling, and folk performance, the film initially seems to focus on a middle-aged woman who becomes increasingly concerned by the failing health of her neighbor, Aurora, a cantankerous old woman taken care of by her Black maid. As in Grand Tour, the narrative midpoint occasions a shift in perspective. We meet Aurora when she is young and beautiful, a settler in an unspecified African country. Her hobbies include cheating on her husband with a hot musician named Gian-Luca and hunting big game, accompanied by the locals whom her people have subjugated.

Much has been made of Tabu’s borrowings from Murnau’s film (black-and-white film stock! Dantean chapters! Colonial anthropology at the origin of filmmaking!), but Gomes’s most radical extrapolation may be related to how Murnau filmed scenes of physical action and somehow silenced them into a purified state of allegory. The first title cards of Murnau’s Tabu, cowritten with Nanook of the North director Robert J. Flaherty, tell the audience that all the actors (bar a few Chinese performers) are Polynesian islanders. We see their idyllic world in its purportedly “original” state. Men spear-hunt fish, women wreathe each other in floral garlands, and one of the men inevitably flirts with one of the women.

The courtship of our indigenous Adam and Eve is interrupted by the appearance of a French sailing vessel. The islanders take to their canoes, paddle madly, and swim the shallows so they can board the ship. Contrary to what we might assume, its crew consists not of Westerners but of another Polynesian community, whose leader has sent a written message demanding one of the island girls as a virginal sacrifice. In the nearly twenty minutes that pass between the opening credits and the arrival of this letter, the film displays no title cards. The islanders exist in a time of unified action, unbroken by the difference that would occasion dialogue or narration. As a harbinger of imperialism, the ship pierces the wholeness of the natives’ world and announces the rupture of language.

Gomes pumps a similar atmosphere of paraphrased time into Tabu by omitting the dialogue track in the film’s lengthy African chapter and replacing it with voiceover. We see Aurora greeting her husband and making love to Gian-Luca, but we never hear what they say. Erasing the central narrative unit of narrative cinema, the dialogue-driven scene, the film feels odorless and frictionless—a little like reading a story onscreen, as some possibly relevant visuals drift by.

But while Murnau’s minimalist use of title cards created a temporal state of innocence, that bigoted sense that native people lived in some prior stage of development, Gomes applies a similar technique to precisely the opposite end, imbuing his Portuguese settlers with blithe dissociation. Banishing dialogue becomes a way of portraying what Hannah Arendt described as the phantom world in which the colonialists live. Since they are disconnected from the land and its inhabitants, the colonialist operates as a superego: someone who is not “part of things,” the Jewish Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi wrote, but instead controls “from a distance without ever being touched by the prosaic and convulsive behavior of men of flesh and blood.”

Gomes’s Tabu is a delicately anticolonial film, one that portrays what Memmi described as the colonialist’s essential mediocrity. Aurora and her white settler friends look rich, clean-cut, and attractive, but the voiceover reminds us that they’re losers ejected from the imperial core. The chief distractions from their underlying sense of futility and aimless rage are parties, pop music, and the sickly-sweet reprieve of being on perpetual holiday. They’re cute, vacuous, and dangerous, not unlike Aurora’s pet: a baby crocodile, whose occasional disappearance into various pools of water hints that something repressed lurks just below the surface.

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Ana Moreira as Aurora in Miguel Gomes’s Tabu (2012)

Tabu does not describe the psychological self-justifications by which the colonialists make their world morally sensible, nor how settler and native identities become inevitably intertwined. But the film does suggest that little separates the colonial state and the individual settler, both quite eager to unleash casual violence upon those around them. Gunfire breaks out at one of Aurora’s pool parties, and soon we see the settlers toying with their rifles as they arm themselves against a perceived African insurrection and subtly transform before our eyes into paramilitaries.

Rather like if someone remade Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl from the perspective of the colonizer, Tabu leaves it up to the viewer to ignore the romance plot and notice the African servants and farmhands in the background. Aurora and Gian-Luca recite their love letters in the voiceover: she compliments his inner “nobility,” and he replies that he is a “despicable villain,” but one whose only crime (sob!) was loving her. The film juxtaposes this purposefully bathetic dialogue with images of African plantation workers tearing leaves and tossing them into their baskets. Tabu’s slender politics lie in moments like this. The characters’ air of grand romance is restored to its actual setting and recontextualized not as an affair between two individuals but as another form of leisure extruded by the colonial power structure.

While Tabu ultimately hinges, as Murnau’s film does, on two men fighting to possess a woman, the heroine of Grand Tour has the opposite problem: she’s empowered, but expends her indomitable energy trying to get married. Molly is by far the film’s most charming and virtuous character, and near the end of the film she forces Chinese coolies to tow her boat against the current of the Yangtze River, so she can catch up with Edward. Will she finally get hitched? We, the audience, want Molly to almost telekinetically compel the story forward by her own considerable willpower. So focused on the question of love and so little concerned with the extras, we may have barely noticed that we’ve sided with the slave master.

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One curious aspect of Tabu is that it qualifies the stakes of its own moral critique. Aurora and Gian-Luca may have been murderous colonialists, but they’ve already got their comeuppance. We know that the Portuguese African empire broke apart after the 1974 Carnation Revolution, and we first meet the characters in the film as geriatric figures, heading toward death in a poor country only getting poorer. By the time Gomes’s next film came out, Portugal had been walloped by the same Eurozone debt crisis that more famously struck Spain and Greece. But the cure would be worse than the illness.

In 2011 the Troika—the unholy trinity of the European Commission, European Central Bank, and IMF—had forced disastrous cuts to public services and the welfare state. By 2015, as Adam Tooze notes in Crashed, the poisoned pill of austerity had sent the long-term unemployment rate skyrocketing to 40 percent.1 Six out of ten young people were jobless. Many were pushed out of their homes after the Troika revoked renters’ protections and reoriented the country toward a tourist economy funded by expats on golden visas.

Credit crisis, austerity, and mass movements: it was in this turbulent cauldron that Gomes fermented his most ambitious film, *Arabian Nights.*An anthology of stories gathered from the craggy hills, verdant countryside, and dilapidated housing complexes of Portugal, the trilogy focuses less on the narrative arcs of any particular characters than on the complex political geography of Portugal itself. The first installment, The Restless One, begins with the testimony of dockworkers discussing their layoffs. Almost none of them appear onscreen, so the viewer spends long stretches at a time staring at a montage of industrial port shots—a didactic rejection of storytelling that feels like hazing. Other voices randomly join the audio track, now talking about how damned hard it is to eradicate wasp nests! You can almost feel Arabian Nights trying to improvise some more enjoyable version of itself.

These dueling conversations insinuate a dilemma that the film itself soon makes explicit: How can one make a film loyal to both radicalism and aesthetics? Breaking the fourth wall, Gomes appears onscreen and, after escaping from his crew, says in voiceover, “You can’t make a militant film which soon forgets its militancy and starts escaping reality. That is betrayal, disengagement, dandyism. Likewise, it’s stupid beyond words to want to tell marvelous stories, timeless fables, fettered by the transient, the foam of days, the present’s closed horizon.”

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Miguel Gomes in his Arabian Nights, Volume 3: The Enchanted One (2015)

Gomes’s dichotomy evokes the opposition that Walter Benjamin famously posed between communism, which politicized art, and fascism, which aestheticized politics. Rather than prioritizing either arts or politics, Gomes adapts the expansive narrative structure of the Thousand and One Nights to cram all of his concerns into a work that changes genre, tone, and even film stock from chapter to chapter. This is a film where a rooster becomes a revolutionary icon, wins a local election, and delivers his own internal monologue. A beached whale explodes. Everyone jumps into the sea! Invention is easier than originality—and what makes Arabian Nights original is not merely its fabulism but its democratizing spirit of creation. Before writing the screenplay Gomes conducted more than a hundred interviews with Portuguese residents about the crisis. He heard such testimony concurrently with the occasional speeches of the right-wing prime minister, whose dehumanizing account of the country’s predicament struck Gomes as a deceptive form of fiction. As the filmmaker recalled in an interview, he quickly decided, “Let’s fight back with real fiction.”

Arabian Nights could be paradoxically described as both docufiction and magical realism. We meet Scheherazade and genies and wizards, but also riled-up factory workers who chat about being fired. Many of the people we see onscreen are nonactors, but some are actors pretending they’re not pretending. Gomes also drew inspiration from news clippings sent by journalists, one of which formed the basis for a narrative about an elderly murderer named Simão, the “man without bowels,” who roams the countryside for forty minutes that feel longer than the accumulated lifespan of the universe. After he is caught by the police, the locals cheer for him as a Hobsbawm-style bandit, an anarchic hero of the countryside. And why not? The economy has squeezed everyone. If you want to survive, you must step outside the law—a point conveyed in another exhausting vignette about a trial where each defendant says they didn’t want to break the law but were forced to by some other law-breaker before them.

The trilogy’s most sustained narrative concerns men who train chaffinches and compete in birdsong contests, a funny yoking together of lyric expression and zero-sum capitalist competition. The birds live in cages, stuck indoors and covered in cloth, their forests having been bulldozed for public housing. In the film’s last minutes one of the birders, an elderly man, gets caught in a net erected across a bucolic green field, as if tangled in “the present’s closed horizon.”

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At one point in Arabian Nights, Gomes documents a fortieth-anniversary celebration of the occupation of Porto’s Boavista neighborhood. The rallygoers wave carnations and sing, somewhat mournfully, the blue-collar anthem “Grândola, Vila Morena.” The Carnation Revolution had not only ended the fascist dictatorship but catalyzed revolutionary councils, mass occupations, and factory takeovers across the country. The right and left both struggled to take power, but the coup that succeeded—and ultimately thwarted this left-wing uprising—came from the social-democratic center.

Arabian Nights can be read as a joyful symptom of the mass anti-austerity movements that sought to finally fulfill that lost promise for a workers’ democracy. On March 12, 2011, more than 200,000 people took to the streets of Portugal—the largest protest since the Carnation Revolution. By some counts a subsequent rally on September 15, 2012, brought out up to twice as many people, shouting slogans like “Fuck the Troika! We want our lives!” I found myself wondering if this libidinous slogan inspired an Arabian Nights chapter titled “The Men with Hard-Ons,” in which a wizard curses the Troika bureaucrats into a state of arousal so unquenchable they temporarily abandon neoliberalism.

The protests gradually ebbed, but in 2015, the year that Arabian Nights came out, something unexpected happened. The country’s center-left party decided to partner with the previously ostracized Communists, the Greens, and the revolutionary Left Bloc. Just as Arabian Nights tried to escape the “closed horizon,” the new coalition hinted at an unexpected off-ramp from the neoliberal consensus of the cold war—the path not taken in the US, where a year later the Democratic Party kneecapped the insurgent Bernie Sanders campaign.

The name of this unlikely coalition was the geringonça, the “contraption,” and its unassimilated mix of interests and tendencies is perhaps not unlike the buzzing symphonic cacophony of Arabian Nights. One way to diagnose the film’s unsynthesized texture—at once charming and alienating, fresh and sophomoric—might be to say that Arabian Nights is merely as rich and annoying as the democratic, multitudinous abundance of the world. In the film, Gomes seems to have settled on neither militancy nor aesthetics but fecundity. In real life, however, the geringonça could not break free from the structural limits imposed from within and without. The liberal electoral victory in 2015 had shocked the very stakeholders who’d imposed austerity on Portugal. “Very negative,” said Angela Merkel. “The worst moment for a radical change,” said the country’s conservative president, Cavaco Silva, who only agreed to appoint the Socialist leader António Costa as prime minister if the left-liberal coalition promised not to change the underlying economic system, such as EU prohibitions on deficit spending.

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A scene from Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights, Volume 3: The Enchanted One (2015)

The geringonça did raise the minimum wage and health care investments, safeguard pensions, and implement basic worker protections. But these incremental changes did not alter the nation’s basic economic trajectory. Wealthy expats moved in, housing prices rose, and the Portuguese began to feel evicted from their own country. When I visited Lisbon last year, I was struck by how the old European capital had been terraformed into a city-sized Airbnb. My taxi driver talked about being gentrified out of the neighborhood in which he was born. “LESS COFFEE ROASTERS, MORE HOUSING,” scrawled one piece of graffiti. A sticker on a streetlamp demanded “DIGITAL NOMADS LEAVE!” That these messages were written in English suggested how the expats had assimilated even their critics. I climbed endless stairways to look down on the historic city where European colonialism had been first discharged but which now found itself stricken by twenty-first-century neocolonialism—and was astonished to hear someone call out, “Hey Ken!” It was an acquaintance who once worked as a coder in Soho.

Since the geringonça could not make life livable for the average Portuguese, much of the working class redirected its anger from the class above them to migrants in the class below. The xenophobic far-right Chega party, whose name means “Enough,” had only one parliamentary seat in 2019 but won sixty in this year’s elections, displacing the liberal socialists and becoming the biggest party after the conservatives. One could easily imagine many of Arabian Nights’s often destitute, rural characters (Simão the elderly bowel-less murderer, the blue-collar chaffinch obsessives) voting for the neofascists promising to implode a claustrophobic system. No other political film I’ve seen has unfurled such a broad skyline of imaginative possibility, but such openness may have its drawbacks. One is frivolity: for better or worse, not a few passages of Arabian Nights seem dedicated to just showing hot people on the beach, and the film’s third part occasionally reduced me to a deranged mess only able to mutter chaffinch-related trivia.

But a second drawback is more political in nature. Gomes is a filmmaker of spontaneity, and we may recall how the early-twentieth-century left used that word to describe popular uprisings that arose seemingly out of thin air. Because such “elemental outbursts” focused primarily on economic grievances, Lenin argued, they were quickly steered away from an anti-authoritarian politics and captured by more conservative ideologies. (Indeed, this is what happened with the Arab Spring and, as the journalist Vincent Bevins has written, most of the global protests of the 2010s.)2 Depending on your perspective, the strength or weakness of Gomes’s political project comes from his refusal of didacticism and a party line. His trilogy preserves the porousness of life, rather than whittling it into an imagined proletarian content, which also means that his exuberant heterogeneity might include the right.

Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One captures a curious moment of populist rage in an ideologically peculiar rally from 2013. We see police in riot gear try to hold back thousands of rioters from storming the capital—but the rioters are police officers themselves, furious over their pensions being cut. One of the trilogy’s few triumphant moments comes when these cops break the cordon and run up to steps of the capital to the exultant sounds of “Perfidia.” Gomes juxtaposes this crowd footage with another idiosyncratic voiceover, this time spoken in Mandarin by a woman who’s migrated from China. Her name is Lin Nuan, which can be translated as “Hot Forest.” Never appearing onscreen, she describes how she meets a young cop and labor organizer at the rally and becomes his lover, only for him to vanish when she becomes pregnant, not unlike Edward in Grand Tour. After having an abortion, Lin Nuan tells the viewer, over images of rejoicing policemen thrusting their white flags in the air, that the Portuguese state has deported her back to Beijing.

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I ended up thinking that Arabian Nights’s approaches could be useful for American artists working after Occupy Wall Street and the George Floyd protests and during the movements that will surely emerge as the right finishes gutting the welfare state. While the US and Europe seem to have reached a less expected end of history—not the perpetual prosperity machine of capitalism but rather post-industrial decline, oligarchy, and xenophobic revanchism—Grand Tour seems to want to travel to where the future is being made. When the film isn’t representing the East as an antique world of expats and folk arts, Gomes depicts it as a cyberpunk-coded metropolis of the future.

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A scene from Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour (2024)

I watched Grand Tour shortly after seeing another vexing work of assemblage that appeared in theaters simultaneously: Caught by the Tides, a film composed of footage that the Chinese director Jia Zhangke shot over the last two decades, including while playing hooky from his other movies. Not unlike Gomes’s cross-pollination between fact and fiction, Jia’s film shows his lead actress, Zhao Tao, playing a fictional character who sometimes collides with real events. She stumbles through a protest and struts the runway of a fashion show, both of which Jia had happened upon while filming. Both Grand Tour and Caught by the Tides reduce original footage—often of live performances, which Jia and Gomes each find intrinsically interesting, occasionally to the viewer’s detriment—to the status of found objects. But in Jia’s film, it feels like things matter. What feels revelatory about watching Caught by the Tides is experiencing an epic mode of time: the passage of years sculpting the faces of his actors, and the world-historical transformation of China from post-Maoist factory zone into a gleaming Arcadia, where joggers run wearing luminous accoutrements and chatty robots roll across shopping mall floors.

Grand Tour doesn’t care too much about the real world. For all of Gomes’s dredging up of colonial subtexts, his films are not terribly curious about the agency or inner lives of the Africans and Asians they depict, who now populate Lisbon. In Tabu I enjoyed glimpsing, as if from a distance, Santa, a woman from Cape Verde who works as Aurora’s maid (played by Isabel Cardoso, who also appears in Arabian Nights’s vignette on public housing). But we never meet any of the Black characters in the film’s colonial chapter, and Gomes has said that Tabu is less about Africans themselves than the “invented Africa” hallucinated by “classical American cinema.”3 And while Grand Tour incidentally provides a narrative précis on colonial transportation and communication networks, the film tells us little about the eruption of anticolonial energy in early-twentieth-century Asia.

Here, once again, Gomes’s true subject is cinema itself. Grand Tour is based on the 1920s travel narrative The Gentleman in the Parlour, but in W. Somerset Maugham’s version the heroine does nab her errant groom. Gomes decided to write a new ending, one so magical that Mubi spoiled it in a promotional featurette. Not unlike a nineteenth-century bourgeois novel, Grand Tour ends with its heroine dying. Molly lays on the jungle floor, a cut below her left eye. A Bressonian grace imbues her sickly face and she passes away. And that’s when it happens.

The lights come on, the film reveals spotlights, cameramen, and more scaffolding, and we hear the jaunty horns of Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea,” as if someone has slid a quarter in the jukebox of heaven. Having crossed the shore between representation and reality, Molly opens her eyes. Has she resurrected or has Crista Alfaiate just finished her take? Against Grand Tour’s aura of decay and decadence, Gomes opens up a small utopian pause where film can undo not just representation but mortality itself and take us somewhere where everything is possible.