By Roger Costa
For the past two decades, celebrated French director Cédric Klapisch has been engaged in the translation of contemporary anxiety through efficient tales, depicting this generation’s unstable conditions and perspectives. An acclaimed and massively awarded filmmaker, including collecting the Top Prize at several Festivals as Best Film for his smash-hit L’auberge espagnole, Klapisch masterfully captures the essence of youth, maturity, expectation and eagerness found in his character-driven, cheerful and optimistic narratives. All these attributes are displayed and perfectly improved in his latest project, “Back To Burgundy”, a sensitive study on the reactions of three siblings facing financial, emotional and familiar life-changing challenges.
It opens with an impressive, enhanced shot on the vineyards, seen through a young Jean, as he stands by the window, reflecting on the importance of family, and narrating the story of his childhood, and his return home after a long decade. This fragile moment of nostalgia will repeat sometimes throughout the story, as it goes back and forth in time, according to its characters’ memories. Jean (hunky Pio Marmaï, whose breakthrough role was as an extravagant Jewish drug-dealer in “Aliyah”) is a stubborn adventurer, who fled home to explore the world and eventually got married and formed a family and his own wine business in Australia. Carrying along uncertain reasons, he returns to his French countryside home, a winemaking community, only to find he missed out his mother’s funeral, his dad is lying unconscious at the Hospital (and dies within the first half hour), and his siblings are overwhelmed and also dealing with personal conflicts their own. Jérémie (François Civil, who appeared in “Moliere” and the indie rock-comedy “Frank”) is having an early marital crisis with his inexperienced wife, newborn baby, and going through aggravations with the in-laws; Juliette (Lumiere Award-nominee actress Ana Girardot) is battling the male-predominance in both her family and the local industry, at the same time she’s trying to gain respect for her efforts. They all share the same hopeless feeling of abandonment as they deeply grieve the dead, while looking through past memories, to find a way to reconnect and settle their future and the family’s history. When their attorney announces their father left the property under debts, and the possible risks of losing it, they must decide quickly on their next move, especially having each, a different reason to resolve the family matter.
Enlightened by the natural shots and elegant angles provided by Alexis Kavyrchine’s cinematography, and scored with a preciously seductive folk/new age soundtrack, the film, written by Klapisch in collaboration with award-winning writer Santiago Amigorena, and actor turned-writer Jean-Marc Roulot, looks at these siblings’ dilemmas and motivations with compelling sensibility and warmth, creating a cheerful sense of family-haven, despite the re-adaptation process. Its delicacy also subtly comments on environmental causes, the chemical abuse in plantations, and the obstacles of preserving organic traditions of cultivating, harvesting and the distinguished talent of tasting. A tender, compassionate examination on the value of family, fellowship, trust, and forgiveness, and convincingly performed with spontaneous, affecting sophistication, Klapisch scores high with this crowd-pleasing drama that tastes as fine and delightful as the wine they make.
(Music Box Films. Opens 3/23. Village East Cinema.)
Comments