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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
Yes, it's going to disappoint people who love the book, because it is so very much pared down. The film would have had to be very long to cover the same ground as the book, which goes from 1808-63 in some detail, and then takes you into the present day. The film is so beautiful that I'd have had the patience to watch it for four or five hours, but perhaps that wasn't practicable. As it is, the best thing is to regard the film as showing you scenes from the book, and then imagine the rest for yourself as you read the book again. But if it's true that a lot more was shot and discarded, then we should hope for a 'director's cut' in due course - or at least a release of the DVD with 'deleted scenes'. Renier, Ulliel and Farmiga play with exquisite sensitivity, and the filming is beautiful. The scene where Xas takes wing and plays with Sobran is enough by itself to earn the film five stars.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
I bought this on a whim, and I have to say that I rather enjoyed it.
An utterly beautiful film, with exquisite cinematography. Every shot carefully planned. Much of the story can be told through the details of the shots as much as the story itself. I found it hard to take my eyes off it, it just looked so wonderful.
An excellent, very well thought out story about a Vintner with a 'guardian angel', we follow him through his life, from when he meets the angel for the first time as a young man, to his death after a long, hard life working on his vines to create the perfect wine. I felt truly sorry when things went bad for him, and my heart soared when things were good.
The main character, Sobran, was great, very clear and well thought out, as I said before, he was very real and you really felt for him. His wife seemed to be important to the story, but she didn't seem to have much of a personality, and seemed to be lacking, which was the same with almost all the other characters, excluding the Vintner himself, and his Angel. I was actually very sorry that there wasn't more of the angel in this film, as he was by far my favourite character, but he only turns up once a year. I was really hoping for some more romance between the Vintner and the angel, but alas, there was hardly any, and it never went anywhere.
I think maybe I must have misunderstood or misread the blurb from the dvd, but I think I was expecting this to be more along the lines of Sobran living with the Angel, Xas, and he was in love with the two women, Celeste and Aurora, and loved each equally and couldn't decide, and that perhaps the Angel loved him, but he also ended up with one of the women. However, I was completely and utterly wrong. And unfortunately for me, I think that the film I desperately wanted to see was the one I was expecting, not the one I got.
Be aware that you might find yourself with your ear very close to the tv, or turning the volume up at some points, as I found that a lot of the time, it wasn't clear what was being said, especially during some of the conversations between Xas and Sobran.
So I'd say this is a film worth watching, but I'm not sure I'd watch it again. Enjoyable, but a little lacking in interesting characters and a variety in storyline. However, I will be looking into reading the book, because I think there might have been a lot of great details missed out of the film.
An utterly beautiful film, with exquisite cinematography. Every shot carefully planned. Much of the story can be told through the details of the shots as much as the story itself. I found it hard to take my eyes off it, it just looked so wonderful.
An excellent, very well thought out story about a Vintner with a 'guardian angel', we follow him through his life, from when he meets the angel for the first time as a young man, to his death after a long, hard life working on his vines to create the perfect wine. I felt truly sorry when things went bad for him, and my heart soared when things were good.
The main character, Sobran, was great, very clear and well thought out, as I said before, he was very real and you really felt for him. His wife seemed to be important to the story, but she didn't seem to have much of a personality, and seemed to be lacking, which was the same with almost all the other characters, excluding the Vintner himself, and his Angel. I was actually very sorry that there wasn't more of the angel in this film, as he was by far my favourite character, but he only turns up once a year. I was really hoping for some more romance between the Vintner and the angel, but alas, there was hardly any, and it never went anywhere.
I think maybe I must have misunderstood or misread the blurb from the dvd, but I think I was expecting this to be more along the lines of Sobran living with the Angel, Xas, and he was in love with the two women, Celeste and Aurora, and loved each equally and couldn't decide, and that perhaps the Angel loved him, but he also ended up with one of the women. However, I was completely and utterly wrong. And unfortunately for me, I think that the film I desperately wanted to see was the one I was expecting, not the one I got.
Be aware that you might find yourself with your ear very close to the tv, or turning the volume up at some points, as I found that a lot of the time, it wasn't clear what was being said, especially during some of the conversations between Xas and Sobran.
So I'd say this is a film worth watching, but I'm not sure I'd watch it again. Enjoyable, but a little lacking in interesting characters and a variety in storyline. However, I will be looking into reading the book, because I think there might have been a lot of great details missed out of the film.
Format:DVD
I really wanted to like this film but feared I wouldn't ... fantasy is so difficult to bring off, and the result is somewhat insubstantial. Having the main character go off to fight in the Napoleonic Wars seemed to be saying that the film was serious, which sat rather incongruously with the appearance of the angel and some rather indulgent wine-tasting scenes. The whole thing is slightly thin, with much more texture and surface appeal than content. It's a bit like looking at a very well illustrated children's book, so that the introduction of further weighty subjects like infant mortality and cancer jars a bit with the lyrical, even magical cinematic style.
On the plus side, it is superbly acted. Jeremie Renier is never less than compelling in any film, and here he is on screen most of the time, and gets the ambiguity of the character's responses in a way that goes a long way towards compensating for the narrative style of the film. Gaspard Ulliel is most striking as the angel; physically it is hard to imagine anyone being more suited to embody such a being, and he has the mystery and gentleness as well as the power - part Herculean, part doe-like. Their scenes together work very well, if only they'd been longer and gone further. The other relationships were less interesting, particularly with the wife, who made almost no impression on me and even at the end looked about twenty, acting alongside her own daughter who must have been well into middle-age. She isn't helped by having so few lines, so that she is little more than a cipher, a projection of Sobran's earthy nature. The noblewoman played by Vera Farmiga is rather better, but their romance fails to take off fully. As I say, the angel was the key to making this a good film, and it should have been far more the story of a bisexual winegrower. The swirling camerawork could have been kept for those scenes, offset by a more static, documentary style in the real-life sequences, which would have given them more substance. It could have been a cross between Agnes Varda's The Gleaners And I and Wings Of Desire, perhaps, and been a truly original hybrid. As it is, much of it glides by in a highly mobile style that doesn't quite animate the characters from within. On second viewing I found it rather more seductive than the first, however, and it has to be said that the landscape and various weather conditions are ravishingly caught.
On the plus side, it is superbly acted. Jeremie Renier is never less than compelling in any film, and here he is on screen most of the time, and gets the ambiguity of the character's responses in a way that goes a long way towards compensating for the narrative style of the film. Gaspard Ulliel is most striking as the angel; physically it is hard to imagine anyone being more suited to embody such a being, and he has the mystery and gentleness as well as the power - part Herculean, part doe-like. Their scenes together work very well, if only they'd been longer and gone further. The other relationships were less interesting, particularly with the wife, who made almost no impression on me and even at the end looked about twenty, acting alongside her own daughter who must have been well into middle-age. She isn't helped by having so few lines, so that she is little more than a cipher, a projection of Sobran's earthy nature. The noblewoman played by Vera Farmiga is rather better, but their romance fails to take off fully. As I say, the angel was the key to making this a good film, and it should have been far more the story of a bisexual winegrower. The swirling camerawork could have been kept for those scenes, offset by a more static, documentary style in the real-life sequences, which would have given them more substance. It could have been a cross between Agnes Varda's The Gleaners And I and Wings Of Desire, perhaps, and been a truly original hybrid. As it is, much of it glides by in a highly mobile style that doesn't quite animate the characters from within. On second viewing I found it rather more seductive than the first, however, and it has to be said that the landscape and various weather conditions are ravishingly caught.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Gorgeous
Beautiful scenery, beautiful men and women - in short, a gorgeous, grape-laden visual treat! As previous reviewers have pointed out, the book is very different to the film - a... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Miss AGT
A disappointment - read the book instead
Having read the book, I found the movie to be a big disappointment. Too many characters and parts of the plot were left out so that in many ways this is very different to the book... Read more
Published 6 months ago by R W McLean
A disappointment
One of my favourite books turned into a disappointing movie. All the parts which made the book shine were hacked out of the movie leaving a bland, uninteresting mess behind. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Joanna
Somewhat dull
Its an average film at best, far to erratic in the way it was structured. The cast's perfomances in the main where poor with only the odd perfomance or part perfomance adding... Read more
Published 14 months ago by PDM
Not so lucky vintner!
Having read the book a few years ago, I had high hopes when I saw that a film of it was being made. I was not disappointed with the DVD but it could have been better. Read more
Published 19 months ago by D. J. Burrows
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