IMDB Plot Synopsis: In 19th century France, a peasant winemaker endeavors to create the perfect vintage.
- I ACCIDENTALLY SAW ANOTHER GASPARD ULLIEL FILM, KILL ME NOW. I knew nothing about this movie other than what I could take from the title and had absolutely no idea he was in this. Oh god. I dislike this guy so much. He’s not an actor and if he’s not an actor, he could at least be a pretty face, but he’s not even that. Please go back to the catwalk, I beg you.
- In related news, Ulliel plays an angel. AN ANGEL. I was not prepared for magical realism to swoop in on me like this. The peasant winemaker, Sobran, of the description above meets up with St. Gaspard annually to shoot the shit about what makes great wine and to ultimately discuss this process as an incredibly obnoxious metaphor for life. After St. Gaspard reveals he’s actually from Hell (oops), our vintner feels betrayed and mopes for several years, his wine suffering as a result. They have a weird fighting / make out scene and then St. Gaspard makes amends by cutting off his wings and allowing the vintner to bury them in the wine cellar. Yep.
- I’m sure that two hundred years from now, 21st century medicine will seem barbaric and primitive but I’d have to say that a 19th century masectomy is NOT something I would ever, ever have wanted to undergo. Naturally, they felt the need to show us the masectomy scar during the sex scene between Sobran and the Baroness. This is not medicine, this is butchery. Thank god for modern anaesthesia.
- Although this movie takes place over about twenty years, the only person who ages is Sobran. Keisha Castle-Hughes plays his wife and looks nineteen through the entire thing. Speaking of which, her character’s physical modification over time was that her hair became more unkempt as she got crazier. Wow!
- St. Gaspard tells Sobran that great wine tastes like the winemaker and so we go through a series of elaborate wine tastings where Sobran’s vintages are described as being in the same state as his emotional and mental health. Some years his wine tastes of regret and sorrow. Others, it tastes of promise. The year he and his wife have sex standing up in a vat of grapes they’ve been stomping? The wine tastes, and this is a direct quote, “like conception”.
WHAT.
Also, gross. - Mostly, the metaphors and sweeping gestures here are too cheesy for me to really get into. The only time I’ve ever gotten into something like this, where something deeply personal is the je ne sais quoi about a particular thing, is The Red Violin. Otherwise, no dice.
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