Back to Burgundy from Australia, BACK TO BURGUNDY is a tale of terroir, tradition and tippling.
Jean (Pio Marmaï) left his family and his birthplace of Burgundy ten years ago to tour the world, finally settling in Australia, beginning a business and starting a family.
Learning of his father’s imminent death, he returns to his childhood home where he reunites with his sister Juliette (Ana Girardot), and his brother Jérémie (François Civil).
It’s a happy reunion but tinged with rapprochement as the prodigal feels the pinpricks of his decade of incommunicado and the fact that he missed his mother’s funeral.
Dad dies just before the harvest begins and Jean decides to stay and help his siblings bring in the grapes, jeopardising his fragile family situation back in Australia.
Over the course of a year, in sync with the rhythm of the seasons, the three young adults rediscover and reinvent their familial bonds, maturing and blossoming along with the wine they are making.
BACK TO BURGUNDY is the latest saga from Cedric Klapisch, the mosaic maestro of the movie trilogy The Spanish Apartment, Russian Dolls and Chinese Puzzle. It is a family saga of sibling binary in an established winery, a Bacchus marsh of emotion, a celebration of nurture and nature.
Fruit of the vine and work of human hands and feet, the wine production of the region is integral to BACK TO BURGUNDY, shot, between Puligny-Montrachet, Chassagne-Montrachet, and Mersault, over the coarse of a year.
Four seasons in one year is gloriously captured by Director of Photography, Alexis Kavyrchine.
In Vino Veritas, BACK TO BURGUNDY feels real. The trio of actors playing the siblings infuse both their shared history as well as the ferment of disappointment. They are all for one and one for all, but have their own, personal trials and tribulations as well.
The sense of family solidarity, the ties of the terroir, the legacy left by generations of vintner is beautifully illustrated in the scene where, to the departed father, the three children open one bottle of the father and one of the grandfather. Just by drinking a few sips, they get a fairly strong sense of who they each were. There is the time, the effort, the thoughts and the very content of life in these glasses.
Film maker Cedric Kapisch has stated that “Essentially, with wine, we bottle nothing less than what it is to be human”.
With BACK TO BURGUNDY, (original title Ce Qui Nous Lie – What Binds Us), Kapisch has done the cinematic equivalent. And that’s well worth raising a glass to.
