Back to Burgundy

Back to Burgundy

In “Red Obsession,” a documentary about the wine industry in France’s Bourdeaux region, Francis Ford Coppola drinks a bottle of wine bottled four years after the French Revolution. “Wine tells a story,” Coppola says. He wonders if Thomas Jefferson or the Marquis de Lafayette had a glass of the same wine. Cédric Klapisch’s “Back to Burgundy” which tells of a year in the life of a fictional wine-making family in Burgundy is all context for this power of wine as story telling.

The taste of the family wines sends the characters back into the past, bunching up time around them. “Back to Burgundy” is gentle and low-stakes (though actual stakes are often quite high), its script (also by Klapisch) episodic. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t; when it focuses on the making process itself, in the progression from vine to bottle, it’s an interesting and very specific look at subculture.

Jean (Pio Marmaï) returns home to France after 10 years abroad because his father is dying. There has been little contact between Jean and his siblings Juliette (Ana Girardot) and Jérémie (François Civil). When their father dies, though, lots of things need deciding about what will happen next with the family business.

They can’t pay the gigantic inheritance tax; they have options: they could sell off part or all of it to pay; they could rent out some portion; Jérémie has married into another winemaking family and is expected to be a partner in his father in law’s business now; Jean has no intention of staying in France he has girlfriend/son waiting for him back in Australia; that leaves Juliette now she must make decisions for upcoming harvest, she does not have her father to consult.

When they were kids, their father used to blindfold them and make them taste the family wines, quiz them. “Behind the lemon, is there another fruit?” he’d ask. Juliette was always best at this game. The dead father (Éric Caravaca) haunts the film in flashbacks but also sometimes literally. Jean talks to his dead father’s ghost, like Nate did with his dad in HBO’s “Six Feet Under.” Nate is the son who left, who refused the father’s legacy; so is Jean.

But in “Six Feet Under,” where there was a constant presence of the father’s ghost, woven into fabric of show here it seems indifferent, intermittent; it trots out the device without a commitment to it that makes for slightly cheesy result; same thing when time folds back on itself and child versions of Jean et al surge into frame where adults are now standing: if film had more frankly poetic and symbolic structure, if it was less literal these might have had more thematic reverb.

Where the film is most successful is in the details of winemaking culture: people arriving for the season, getting drunk at end-of-harvest parties, tasting wine mid-ferment, staring at the sky and refreshing weather apps obsessively. These passages are alive; they know what they’re doing and saying. Juliette has to throw her weight around as boss for the first time, reprimanding one of seasonal workers after he instigates a grape fight in field. He pushes back against her authority. This fight has an unexpected ending later on; unlike many other sequences, it crackles with life.

Each sibling has his or her own emotional arc. Jean stays longer than intended to help with harvest (to girlfriend and son’s chagrin); Juliette finds herself thrust into leadership role at vineyard; Jérémie needs to assert himself as independent man while being infantilized by new in laws. Some of these plotlines are interesting; some are stretched out practically to point of slow motion, like subplots that get elongated during TV show’s middle seasons.

Dialogue is often so on the nose you can’t believe it wasn’t excised at some point during process (“Love is like wine,” Jean says in voiceover near beginning. “It takes time. It needs to ferment”).

The episodic quality of script looks awkward on page when one scene sets up problem or conflict that then gets resolved or answered by next scene: Jean says he doesn’t care about family vineyard or land at all and in following scene catches neighboring farmer spraying pesticides on area that overlaps with family’s vines and flies off handle; his girlfriend (María Valverde), visiting from Australia, comments: “I guess you do care about land after all.”

Along with music that creates mood so insistently (and underlines connection between scenes so heavily) that moments don’t have air to breathe, “Back to Burgundy” wants to make sure we get it. Proust’s madeleine never fretted so much.

However, “Back to Burgundy” still has much going for it. The three lead actors create a believable sense of the kind of closeness, absurdity and intensity that tends to be present among adult siblings. This is harder than it sounds. But of all the many storylines in this film, perhaps none is as satisfying in its own way as Juliette’s journey toward becoming the family’s true wine maker and her father’s natural heir.

At every stage she must make decisions, choices that used to be made by her father alone. Should they pick yet? Should they stop fermenting now? Sometimes she doesn’t know. In a sense, within this family where everything is tradition and things have always been done a certain way for ages upon ages in this context for her to decide based on what she wants (rather than trying imitate what she thinks would have been done by him) is quietly feminist act; because it’s only arc throughout “Back To Burgundy” that isn’t blared at us with music or voice-over dialogue but which left behind most pleasant taste nevertheless.

Watch Back to Burgundy For Free On Gomovies.