Back to Burgundy is one of those watchable, passable, but ultimately boring and undemanding films of which the French makes a few a year as classy products to export as your “quintessentially French film”.
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Despite the French’s twin love for wine and film, this reviewer has seldom seen a French film with wine as the dramatic centrepiece. Mention wine and film and probably for most people, the American film by Alexander Payne, Sideways, would be the only film one can call to mind.
French director Cedric Klapisch’s latest film, Back to Burgundy, may not become the definitive French vineyard film that Sideways is for the USA, but it is a handsomely and capably mounted film, boasting excellence from every department, but somehow never coming together to surpass the sum of its parts.
The story is set in the painterly world of Burgundy’s vineyards. Its owners are three siblings - Jeremie, the youngest in the family, Juliette, the middle child, and Jean, the oldest brother who left his country and has been away for 10 years. The story begins when Jean returns to his childhood home where, a decade ago, he left because of his father’s imperial method of child-rearing. Now Jean is back because his father has passed and the siblings have inherited their father’s vineyards and have to decide how to proceed when they are slapped with a hefty inheritance tax.
Back to Burgundy is one of those watchable, passable, but ultimately boring and undemanding films of which the French makes a few a year as classy products to export as your “quintessentially French film”.
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