Perfect to start the autumn season in the best possible way, and not surprisingly among the TV programs tonight there is A great vintage, a 2006 film directed by Ridley Scott ( Alien , Blade Runner , Gladiator ). 118 extremely unusual minutes for the award-winning British director awarded the title of Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, who with this work approaches the sentimental going to tell the redemption, actually rather predictable, of an English finance businessman who rediscovers himself and re-learns to enjoy the little things in life. Let’s see it in more detail in the post dedicated to the reviews of famous films, edited by our portal.
Plot of An excellent vintage
Max Skinner ( Russell Crowe ), a cynical London broker, inherits from his affectionate uncle Henry ( Albert Finney ) Chateau La Siroque, an estate with vineyard in Provence (France). Determined to sell the property to monetize the legacy, Skinner is fascinated by it and gets lost in the memory of the summers spent in France as a child. The man rediscovers the flavors of his past, the values that his uncle had tried to teach him and his childhood friends; he knows Abbie Cornish (Australian Christie Roberts ), an American girl who claims to be Henry’s unknown daughter, and especially Fanny Chenal (French Marion Cotillard), the owner of the village bistro, with whom he clashes and falls in love with.
The screenplay
The subject of An Excellent Vintage is based on the novel of the same name by Peter Mayle , an ex-American advertiser who moved to Provence to devote himself to writing and a close friend of Scott, himself the owner of an estate with a vineyard in the region. The director himself would have encouraged the writing of the novel, then entrusted to the screenwriter Marc Klein for the film adaptation. Klein himself would later spend some time in Provence while writing the screenplay. Naturally, it was an ode to the region, its landscapes and its wines, wonderfully expressed in the setting in Gordes and Bonnieux and in the vineyard scenes shot at Chateau La Canorgue, in the Luberon area, during the 2005 harvest.
Review of An excellent vintage
Beautiful tribute to Provence , which in fact makes the film perfect for this early autumn. Beautiful melancholy and sentimental atmosphere at the right point. Good interpretation of the actors , even Crowe, in a role, also in this case, for him decidedly unusual. Too bad Scott plays excessively on the stereotype with a very specific project in mind: to build a smart and easily usable product, capable of entertaining without going into the demanding. Poor plot , few developments and nodes of the narrative. Too little for a director who, always paired with Crowe, was able to bring a film of the caliber of Gladiator to the general public, on the other hand, giving world fame to the New Zealand actor. The sentimental is not his language, and it is perceived. We are a long way from the pathos that filled the big screen with Robin Hood and from the iconicity of Thelma and Loiuse , a film that won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best original screenplay. An excellent vintage ends in a classic story of redemption with sentimental implications and a captivating setting. The result is a film that sounds like you’ve already heard – it is no coincidence that box office receipts repay the investment in production, without going much further – but capable of filling the first cool evenings in October.Sofa, cover and a nice glass of rose de Provence, and we are able to find, in front of the TV, that easy usability that Ridley Scott was looking for. Good film for these autumn idle evenings.
