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A Good Year
This past weekend included a run up to a highly anticipated, dreamy Sunday morning. I had the last day of the weekend, first day of the week in question off, a rarity these past months, but harvest is over. Sadly I did not share this keen bit of information with my body clock. I was up before 5 am tossing and turning, so I started cleaning house and doing laundry. By the time the sunrise had set in, there was a pale, blue sky overhead and wispy clouds. A chill was in the air and nothing was better than to pull a sweater, hot and dry from the tumbling machine and put it on while folding my clothes before walking back to my apartment. With the weekend chores all checked off, I decided to see a movie matinee in the early afternoon. The movie in question is an adaptation of Peter Mayle's 2004 book, A Good Year. Not to be confused with Jay McInerney's sequel to Brightness Falls, called The Good Life about the coming of age couple we met in Brightness still living in New York, but now in a post 9/11 New York where everything you once cherished can now be turned on end, examined and re-examined. Across the pond, we are introduced to a character who needs a little less than fire from the sky to realize he has veered from what is truly important. A Good Year is about a narcissistic London Banker who inherits a vineyard in the South of France. Russell Crowe stars. The big screen story was changed significantly from the book. I won't delve into the dirty details about the international intrigue Mayle penned into his fluffy fiction. But for American viewing audiences, I don't think it was necessary for the Hollywood machine to follow true to the story line. The screen written changes from paperback to celluloid produced a movie that was soft and simple and had the hook of the never trite finding the true meaning in life - which is far from money, models or material things the protagonist pursued during his daily life in London. Although wine played a major role in the book, it was lessened in the film to a complementary, 'supporting' as they say in Hollywood, role. Just as wine should be - no verbal bashing of Merlot, no waxing poetic about Pinot, no dousing oneself in the spit of others or treating marriage like the end of the world and allowing oneself to party like Prince circa 1999. I would recommend the movie if you have a chance to see it. The scenes and the settings are escapist and do transport you to a better place, but maybe it was the theater, maybe the canister of film, but the story showed slightly solemn on the screen. We know van Gogh subliminally paints dark and dismal back-stories onto all of his canvases, but his many paintings from the South of France still show a significant amount of color. The colors that we are accustomed to associating with this region - the yellows and reds and warm browns and the blue skies reflecting the proximity to the wine dark Mediterranean Sea. However, the movie did justice to the time and place and the culture of the Southern European lifestyle where the ticking clock of history stands still because suntanned ancestry of this magnificent place sold their soul to Mother Nature for countless waking hours of appreciation away from the advances of society and its evil influences. In theaters now.
Post - November'06 Back to home...
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