The Vintner’s Luck—review

I have always prided myself on being economic with words. Vintner’s Luck can be summed up thusly: “Wine. Fallen angel. Breast cancer. Fungicide. Keisha’s tits.”

It is tempting to leave it at that. But that wouldn’t be doing it justice and justice is what needs to be done.

I  had been pondering movies to compare this to. I just could not put my finger on it. It was nothing like Whale Rider (Caro’s previous film) or Silence of the Lambs—the movie I wisely watched before seeing VL. Then when I first saw Xas (Gaspard Ulliel)  it hit me: Dogma, except not as good.

The storyline:  uppity peasant proves he has spirit and a good palate. Peasant befriends an Angel. Peasant gets married, has kids. Devastation 1: child dies. Devastation 2: Peasant finds out his friend is a fallen angel. Devastation 3: the entire vineyard has to be pulled up and burnt because of fungal rot. Love story 1: Sobran (Jérémie Rénier)  and Celeste (Keisha Castle-Hughes). Love story 2: Sobran and Xas. Love Story 3: Sobran and Aurora de Valday (Vera Farmiga).

The only device Caro uses to denote that time has passed is Sobran’s side burns. As time goes on they get longer and fluffier.  Up until the last 10 minutes of the movie—even though something like 18 years have elapsed—Sobran still looks like he is in his early 20s. She is even less careless with Celeste, a peasant who gives birth to four children, manages to retain her youthfulness.

You can never get a good look at Xas doing the only cool thing he does in the movie: Fly. Perhaps a good thing because when you do see it during the Xas / Sobran foreplay/fight it looks terrible. The CGI was fairly bad by today’s standards and it’s garishness detracted from what was supposed to be an intimate scene.

VL also is possibly the best argument for fungicide and crop spraying I have seen in a while. Organic wine, as my friend Paul says, just isn’t that good and this movie shows why it is beneficial to spay as many chemicals onto our crops as possible.

The cinematography is odd. There are a lot of scenes shot with handheld cameras, especially when Sobran is meeting Xas. This can get a bit too much. This shoddy work is totally outshone by some of the beautiful shots of the vineyard critters and buggies.

Keisha throughout the movie looks like Once Were Warriors dropped into Napoleonic France. Her faux activism and poor acting skills aside, her accent wasn’t convincing and obviously strained. I’m sure Caro could have hired a better young French actress to play the part. The only positive thing she does during the movie is show us her breasts, and even they’re not that great.

Homosexuality is a large theme in the book. I’m dubious as to whether a mortal man and an angel can truly have a homosexual relationship or exactly how the physics work, but artistic license wins in all forms of fiction.

This entire plot was shut out by Caro. Sobran’s devine-curiousness is fleeting and a fumbling kiss and some rough erotic fighting is all we see between the two. Thus shutting down the ultimate love story of the book.

This leaves potentially the most moving event in the book—the removal of Xas’ wings, making him mortal—on the writing room floor.

In the book Satan himself comes up to remove the wings. The love expressed in this act is one literature’s greatest tropes and it was sad to see the entire story line hacked off like the feathery appendages.

It is very easy to pan a movie that everyone else has and I have done. There were good parts. Vera Farmiga’s performance, while she didn’t have an accent, was decent as was Renier’s. Both were let down by the way the movie was cut. But for all the things that annoyed me I’m not willing to say this is a bad movie. It was a decent movie where the constituent parts just weren’t that great and the screen play varied markedly from the book. One almost wishes Bartleby and Loki would come down and start slaying sinners.

I suggest reading the book by Elizabth Knox (ISBN: 0312264100) or listening to the audio version that has been playing on Nine to Noon with Kathryn Ryan on National Radio.

Ultimately the movie is summed up by the first thing you see:

“A Nicki Caro Film“.

The directors name in Red. A perfect metaphor for the blood of the author Caro spilt in making this movie.

The Vintner’s Luck
Written and Directed by Niki Caro
With Jeremie Renier, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Gaspard Ulliel and Vera Farmiga