Dvd
The Vintner's Luck
Kiwi director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) follows up her well-received Hollwood debut, North Country, with this adaptation of Elizabeth Knox's novel about a peasant winemaker in Napoleon-era, 19th Century France. Stars the great Vera Farmiga (The Departed) and Keisha Castle-Hughes as a foxy salt-of-the-earth peasant girl.
Sobran Jodeau (Jérémie Renier) is an ambitious young peasant winemaker with three loves – his beautiful and passionate wife Celeste (Keisha Castle-Hughes), the proudly intellectual baroness Aurora de Valday (Vera Farmiga) and Xas (Gaspard Ulliel), a fallen angel who strikes up an unlikely but enduring friendship. Under the angel's guidance, Sobran is forced to fathom the nature of love, belief and immortality – in pursuit of the perfect vintage.
Starring Jérémie Renier, Gaspard Ulliel, Vera Farmiga, Keisha Castle-Hughes
Directed by Niki Caro ('North Country, Whale Rider')
Written by Niki Caro, Joan Scheckel (based on the novel by Elizabeth Knox)
Romance, Fantasy, Drama, Adaptation | 2hr 7mins | Rated (M) | contains sex scenes | Origin: New Zealand, France | Official Site »
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The Talk
7 votes / No comments
Flicks review
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3
If it wasn’t for the white-winged, waxed-chested angel, The Vintner’s Luck might not have endured such a hellish reception following its debut at the Toronto Film Festival. Kiwi director Niki Caro took a massive risk adapting Elizabeth Knox’s complex, erotic novel, particularly when she decided to shift the focus from theology and the relationship with the angel to Sobran’s wine-making skills.
Then again, the angel who befriends the protagonist in this ambitious epic of passion, toil and mortality is not the only distraction in this otherwise impressive-looking feature. Although the script mostly avoids sentimentality, so much of Sobran’s life is packed into the 127 minutes it’s difficult to get a sense of time passing, just as it’s hard to know if Caro meant for the gaps in narrative to be filled by intelligent guess work. Each time the angel arrives for his yearly visit, the context and setting are lost. That’s a shame because everything else – the cinematography, scenery and tone, is a work of beauty.
Although Keisha Castle-Hughes as the vintner’s wife seems a little young to be spawning so many little angels of her own, French actor Jeremie Renier gives a hearty performance as Sobran and Vera Farmiga as the vulnerable yet strong-willed Baroness balances elegance with vulnerability. If you’ve been craving a heartfelt cinematic explanation of the wine-making process, you’ll find it in the grape-squelching, dirt-eating, bug-crawling earthiness of The Vintner’s Luck. Just ignore that heavenly creature.
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The people's reviews
15 reviews
Press Reviews
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Christchurch Press (Graeme Tuckett)
2
The Vintner's Luck is good to look at, and a few scenes hint at the film I think the book, and we, deserved. But the rest is a baffling
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Hollywood Reporter
Very silly and incoherent melodrama gets tangled up in the wings of an angel.
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NZ Herald (Peter Calder)
2
The dreary, rambling narrative, the trite theme, the unconscionably long running time combine to make a major disappointment.
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TV3 (Kate Rodger)
3
It was an ambitious project to adapt this tale, and while it’s in no way a failure, it’s certainly not a triumph.
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Variety (USA)
New Zealand writer-director Niki Caro delivers her least impressive vintage with this drearily literal-minded adaptation of "The Vintner's Luck," Elizabeth Knox's novel about a 19th-century French peasant who receives celestial guidance in matters of love and winemaking. It's one of those ambitious grand-summation works -- rooted in the bittersweet truism that life, like wine, grows richer with age -- but not even Caro's earthy, sensuous filmmaking can overcome the tale's glib supernatural conceit, overstated moral lessons and overall dramatic torpor.
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