Back to Burgundy movie review (2018)
When his father becomes ill, Jean (Pio Marmaï) returns home to the family vineyard in France after 10 years abroad. There has been little to no contact between Jean and his two siblings, Juliette (Ana Girardot) and Jérémie (François Civil). When their father dies, the siblings must make some serious decisions about the family business. Unable to pay the huge inheritance tax, they consider their options. They could sell the vineyard to pay the tax. They could rent out part of it. Jérémie has married into another wine-making family, and it's expected he will step up to be a partner in his father-in-law's business. Jean, with a girlfriend and son back in Australia, has no intention of staying in France. That leaves Juliette. It's now up to her to make the decisions for the upcoming harvest, and she doesn't have her father to consult.
When Jean, Juliette and Jérémie were children, their father would blindfold them and make them taste the family wines, quizzing them. "Behind the lemon, is there another fruit?" he asks. Juliette was always the best at this game. Their dead father (Éric Caravaca) haunts the film, in flashbacks but also sometimes literally. Jean converses and argues with the ghost of his dead father, similar to how the ghost of the father was used in HBO's "Six Feet Under." Like Jean, Nate in "Six Feet Under" is the son who left, who refused the father's legacy. But unlike "Six Feet Under," where the presence of the father's ghost was a constant, woven into the fabric of the show, "Back to Burgundy" uses the device indifferently and intermittently. There's no commitment to the trope, leading to a slightly cheesy result. The same is true for the moments when time folds in on itself, and the child versions of Jean, Juliette and Jérémie surge into the frame where the adults are now standing. If the film had a more frankly poetic and symbolic structure, if it was less literal, these devices might have had more thematic reverb.
Where the film is on firmest ground is in specifics of the culture of wine-making: the seasonal workers showing up, the rowdy parties at the end of the harvest, the taste-testing during the fermenting process, the worried glances at the sky, the obsessive checking of Weather Apps. In these sequences, the film really knows what it is doing, knows what it wants to say and convey. There's a whole section where Juliette has to throw around her weight as the boss for the first time, and publicly reprimands one of the seasonal workers for initiating a grape-fight in the fields. He pushes back against her authority. This altercation has an unexpected denouement later on, and unlike many of the other sequences, this one sparks with life, spontaneity, the unexpected.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46bmJyjXam8bq7Uq56uppSuenN8kHE%3D