The Vintner's Luck

Starring Jeremie Renier, Keisha Castle-Hughes. Directed by Niki Caro. M.

What works in a novel, with the reader's imagination envisaging the written words, doesn't automatically translate successfully to a movie screen – as this disappointing adaptation of The Vintner's Luck shows.

Elizabeth Knox's novel was critically acclaimed and popular. This film version by co-writer and director Niki Caro (Whale Rider, North Country) sets out to tell its tale of human aspiration and divine inspiration, focusing on a peasant named Sobran in early 19th-century France who realises his dream, with angelic assistance, of becoming a great winemaker.

Such a movie's initial hurdle is audience acceptance of its key supernatural ingredient. Other films have made such leaps of belief with surprising ease – Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, for instance, in which a character in a movie within the movie walks off the screen into the story, or Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, in which two angels roam Berlin in the 1980s.

Yet Caro struggles to effectively suspend disbelief. When an inebriated Sobran one night sees and converses with a young man with giant white wings seemingly strapped over his shoulders to his back, he responds as if it isn't the miraculous encounter it is.

"Are those real wings? Are you a real angel? Am I dreaming, mad or having a drunken hallucination?" any of us might exclaim. Instead, Sobran takes this extraordinary encounter in stride and gets some advice and eventually some vines to plant, in exchange agreeing to meet the angel at the same time and place every year. Then he goes home and doesn't mention the angel to his wife, Celeste.

This integral part of the film remains unconvincing either as magical realism or fantasy fairytale and detrimentally affects the movie's story of interlocking and overlapping triangles, two corners of which are always Sobran and Celeste and the third Sobran's passion to make great wine, his relationship with the angel or his relationship with another woman.

The latter is the widowed Baroness Aurora, who has inherited the chateau and vineyard where Sobran lives and works – and whose muted life is reawakened and rejuvenated by her attraction to Sobran and, through him, an interest in wine.

To her credit, Caro at times instils a lyricism and sensuousness to the depiction of winemaking. But the film labours to be emotionally involving in relating how life is like wine, requiring risks and sacrifices to reap rewards and a balance of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow to achieve greatness.

Instead, the movie is often sluggish and ponderous, with neither Jeremie Renier as Sobran nor Vera Farmiga as the baroness able to animate their characters sufficiently to vitalise the story. Meanwhile, Keisha Castle-Hughes' role as Celeste is mainly one of passive onlooker or Sobran's lovemaking mate.

Finally, the relationship between Sobran and the angel (Gaspard Ulliel) has homoerotic suggestions but the film merely flirts with this mutual affection and attraction, culminating in a balletic physical dalliance that is more fatuous (you can sense the wires) than affecting in its staging.

In the end, The Vintner's Luck proves to be Caro's folly, just as her Whale Rider was a wonderful movie. Certainly, the degree of difficulty in adapting Knox's novel to the screen would have been challenging for any film-maker – and perhaps Caro's involvement as director, writer and producer overwhelmed her objective judgment. However, whatever caused this misfire doesn't erode confidence that Caro has more film vintages in her to come.

- © Fairfax NZ News