The Vintner's Luck

Rating

: * *

Verdict

:

Obscure and frustrating allegory.

Among the many irritating things about Niki Caro's adaptation of Elizabeth Knox's best-selling novel is the frequent use of a hand-held camera. It doesn't do that nauseatingly vertiginous swirling thing (well, not often anyway) but it constantly jitters and shivers and loses the framing, as if the sound recordist were bumping into the camera operator. And - although this may have been a projection error at the preview screening - large slabs of it are out of focus.

It seems appropriate, really, since the story is so blurred. It takes some time to work out what century it's set in; at one point, the main character is at war (though against whom, where and why I had no idea); towards the end, when Castle-Hughes is meant to be an old woman, she looks younger than her screen daughter. Confused? You will be.

It's the story of Sobran Jodeau (Renier), a labourer in the vineyard of a French chateau who aspires to be a winemaker. One night he is visited by angel Xas (Ulliel) who urges him to pursue his dream - he will even provide him with vine cuttings from a plot he tends. They agree on an annual meeting at which Jodeau can report his progress and Xas, whose appetites are distinctly earthly, can taste the latest vintage.

As the years pass, the vintner marries the dark and tempestuous local beauty Celeste (the egregiously miscast Castle-Hughes). When the vineyard owner dies, his heir, Baroness Aurora (Farmiga), takes over and she and Sobran form a partnership that starts out quasi-spiritual and progresses through the carnal to the distinctly weird.

The film implicitly invites us to find that Celeste's rather mild displeasure at this state of affairs is obstructive of Jodeau's life mission: to discover, under the tutelage of Xas, that wine is an expression not just of its terroir but of its maker's state of mind, and that vintages ebb and flow like life itself.

If this seems so obvious as to be banal it's all of a piece with the melodramatic feel of the whole project. It tries for an epic reach but it is mired in the mud and yet we are denied any intimate contact with the characters, who remain ciphers in an obscure and frustrating allegory.

The shame of it is that the production values are high (well mostly; every time that angel shows up it's like a school pantomime) and there are some sequences - the burning of diseased vines and some of the winemaking - that verge on the sublime. But the film is undone both by its small details (New Jersey native Farmiga speaks like Emma Thompson while most of the rest speak franglais) and its larger conception. The dreary, rambling narrative, the trite theme, the unconscionably long running time combine to make a major disappointment.

Peter Calder

Cast

: Jeremie Renier, Gaspard Ulliel, Vera Farmiga, Keisha Castle-Hughes

Director

: Niki Caro

Running time

: 127 mins

Rating

: M (contains sex scenes)