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“Everything that follows is true. Exactly as we dreamed it,” reads the opening title of “Burgundy,” from award-winning documentary duo Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, with an almost legible wink. It’s a sweet start
to a sweet movie, but in retrospect it sounds a little defensive, as though the pair are aware that, especially compared to their last two lovely films — 2020’s “The Truffle Hunters” and 2024’s “Gaucho Gaucho” — “Burgundy” feels less like an incisive portrait of a particular arcane lifestyle than a rambling reverie about it. Amiably riffing on the viticultural tradition of the eponymous winemaking region of eastern-central France, “Burgundy” has more fragrance than substance and even then, too quickly loses its bouquet.
If dream it is, however, it’s a pleasant one — no night terrors in these terroirs — especially given that the directors, who are also responsible for the scrumptious cinematography, find so much material for their trademark, eye-catchingly pictorialist visuals. As perky ’60s pop songs play, perfectly composed chateaux-tableaux that are so crowded with billiard tables, oil paintings and antique tchotchkesthey feel like slightly sardonic wealth critique, we are first introduced to Bertrand Devillard, patriarch of a winemaking estate that dates back 160 years. Bertrand is a hands-on boss, and even when relaxing by the pool or doing a little skeet shooting, a worried one. His grandson Melchior is more interested in the world of high finance than in taking over the family business that would naturally be his inheritance.
That there would be plenty of people from outside the clan willing to step into that breach is proven by Enzo, a handsome young man with the throwback good looks of a midcentury matinee idol (he self-consciously models himself after his hero, Jean Gabin) whose ambition is one day to run his own vineyard. For the time being he comes to work on Bertrand’s estate, learning the ropes from the bottom up — cleaning the massive vats, stomping the season’s harvest, sampling wines he could never otherwise afford in an effort to educate his palate. Amusingly sketch-like intros then round out the rest of the cast, which includes Enzo’s eventual girlfriend, Céleste, a trainee sommelier; Patrick, the maitre’d of a nearby 3-Michelin-Star restaurant; and Guillaume, a recently separated wine critic whose adventures in dating, therapy and physio (for RSI due to lifting 100 glasses a day) make him the droll comic relief in a film whose tone is rarely serious enough to need relieving.
As in their other feature docs, Dweck and Kershaw’s craftsmanship is superb — they’re at least as meticulous and detail-oriented as their proudly finicky subjects. And the deliberately stilted restaging of interactions that likely originally happened in a much less picturesque manner is an inextricable part of their approach. So too are editor Pauline Gaillard’s sharp cuts, which are often timed exactly to coincide with the moment that someone lost in faraway thought finishes swirling their mouthful of Pinot Noir and hocks it unceremoniously into a nearby receptacle.
Less successfully, this time out the directors further break strict documentary protocol by including some whimsical 8mm footage, usually of Enzo and Céleste’s burgeoning relationship, which is again nicely shot but feels reversed in, as though it was only included as filler when the actual storylines were found to be getting bit sparse. An entire sequence in which the pair go to the movies to watch “Bonnie and Clyde” and then enact their own heist as pastiche versions of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, is just a bit too cute and a digression too far from the film’s ostensible topic.
“The Truffle Hunters” followed several leathery Piedmontese old-timers and their absurdly touching relationships with their truffle-snuffling dogs. “Burgundy,” by contrast, has no natural source of such effortless, warm-hearted charm and without it, the portraiture sometimes veers closer to caricature. Perhaps for the first time, the limitations of Dweck and Kershaw’s deliberate, constructed style make themselves felt: when messy real life intrudes, the film rather flounders. Enzo abruptly goes off-script, so to speak, and quits the Devillard estate to try his hand at mussel farming and pouf! The narrative of a dedicated striver following his long-cherished dream evaporates at the revelation that maybe his lifelong fascination with viticulture was not so lifelong after all.
The filmmakers hastily shift course and retool the final third of “Burgundy” as a kind of star cross’d lovers romance, when Céleste also quits her apprenticeship and moves to Paris, and the young, sundered couple can be portrayed as pining for one another. Not only is this pivot a little hard to invest in, given we’ve been burned before, more grievously, it takes the main focus of the action away from the very region and wine culture the film is purportedly celebrating.
It is possible that true wine experts will respond to those parts of “Burgundy” that unabashedly ennoble the various different disciplines within the wine arts. Film lovers, on the other hand might be left unsatisfied by an approach that strains the limits of documentary realism to no particular end, save to further mythologize an already singularly rarefied sphere. And even if “Burgundy” is for oenophiles rather than cinephiles, presumably they too will be a little let down by a vintage that is fruity and full of promise at the first sip, but that loses its complexity — if not its easy drinkability — long before the last.
