You don’t actually have to make a feature length film to teach people about vineyards, do you? This kind of thing usually requires an instructional video like: “Grape Expectations: Where Does Wine Come From, Anyway?” Well, heck, if you’re like me, you’ve lived in a wine-making region your entire life without knowing jack about the biz. Heck, I don’t even know how to spell “ownephile” “oonefile” “oenephile” whatever. Clearly, I could stand some instruction in movie form.
Estranged son Jean (Pio Marmaï) has returned to the family for the death of his father. It takes roughly 2.3 seconds (metric time) for younger sibs Juliette (Ana Girardot) and Jérémie (François Civil) to go from buttery croissants of excitement to: “Hey, you abandoned us; you piece of merde.” Their awkward reunion is immediately overshadowed by awkward finance talk. A vineyard, it would seem, is like a yacht on land – a symbol of opulence, refined taste, and cash sink-hole. Oh, I’m sure many vineyards make money; this doesn’t seem to be one them. Dad gave the trio the keys to the vineyard and the debt of the vineyard in tandem. And before that issue can be settled, another one hijacks the moment: it’s time to make the donuts, er, wine.
How would you handle this scenario: You own a vineyard you can’t afford; it’s harvest time and your temps start having a grape fight? (I’m trying to think of companies in which playfully destroying the inventory wouldn’t lead to a lawsuit. Imagine the Apple employees having an iPhone fight … or the Michelin workers having a tire fight … I wonder if Stanley workers go for Hardware Wars.) “Hey, you Grape Apes, knock it off! You’re almost literally throwing money away.”
There’s a lot of the wine process in this film … planting, growing, picking, smelling,
testing, tasting, stomping, aging, and, of course, hocking loogies into the vat. No, no, I’m just kidding; they did much worse than that. Do people still stomp grapes for wine? There really isn’t an electronic foot stamper that gets the job done with greater efficiency? Or do we just like wine that smells like feet?
Back to Burgundy is a bottleneck of family issues just waiting to be uncorked and poured over the audience, but every time the film gets to explore an issue or give character insight, the wine-making process takes over. The film seems to have only superficial concern for this trio of twenty-something sibs and their lives. I’m not fooled; this movie was one big ploy to teach wine creation and vineyard maintenance to an unsuspecting generation of French movie fans. You get the same in Simpsons’ season one.
♪The bold of Bordeaux
The brut of Cham-pagn-e
Will seem orange soda
When you get ours on, ya
The grapes we find here
Will pen a memoir
Oh, with all that you can dare
Collect that fruit, mon frère
Wine, gens, wine for the making
It’s wine, gens, every last drop
Grab a vine, frère
Right there
Ferment that vintage
We’ll make a mintage
Check out our bon label design
It’s old and it’s wine, wine, wine ♫
Not Rated, 113 Minutes
Director: Cédric Klapisch
Writer: Cédric Klapisch, Santiago Amigorena
Genre: Mostly white, maybe the occasional merlot
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Wine makers
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Feuding siblings
♪ Parody Inspired by “Mine, Mine, Mine”
