Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? Max Skinner (Russell Crowe) is charmed by Fanny Chenal (Marion Cotillard) in Ridley Scott's A Good Year. (20th Century Fox)
Who doesn’t romanticize France? Baguettes and scarves and Bordeaux at breakfast — ooh la la! Then again: race riots and homogeneity and general strikes — ooh la la. Hollywood prefers the first scenario, and when it comes to movies set in Europe, entire countries can find themselves stuffed into the movie fantasy grinder where all that comes out are a couple of drops of reductionist essence: Italians love-a the vino! The Greeks love-a the life! And the French aime l’amour!
There’s nothing wrong with a good Roman Holiday escape fantasy set in an exotic locale, but a film needs a reason to exist other than as a live action Frommer’s Guide. The stereotype-strangled A Good Year is the worst kind of perpetrator of the ooh la la! school of Euro-porn. Russell Crowe plays officious, smarmy Max Skinner, a cutthroat London bond trader who returns to his deceased uncle’s Provencal château and vineyard, from whence his long-lost innocence sprang. Uncle Henry (Albert Finney, harrumphing adorably in flashbacks) loved the good life — the wine, the women, the clichés — and he intended to pass on his Dionysian playground to his insider-trading nephew, who measures pleasure in dollars.
The prospect of unloading the château for a wad of cash is enough motivation for Max to take a night away from the office and fly Air France. Fish, say goodbye to water. Things sure are different in France, Max notices right away, as he tries to navigate sun-dappled country roads in his pesky Smart car. The painful sight gag of a Smart car endlessly circling a roundabout is actually one of the film’s funnier moments, and it’s not funny. Director Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down) knows big, and he knows emotionally extravagant, but he has absolutely no understanding of slapstick. Nonetheless, Crowe is forced to deliver near spit-takes and scramble up the walls of a mud-filled swimming pool as he learns the meaning of joie de vivre.
Max (Crowe) gets an impromptu tennis lesson. (20th Century Fox)
Max soon discovers that by simply clearing a few cobwebs, the château looks charming. Add a bicycle-riding beauty named Fanny Chenal (Marion Cotillard) and a few multi-course dinners with the grumpy locals, and the charm monitor is spiking. Enter a pretty blonde American (Abbie Cornish) who might have a claim on the land and the charm monitor overloads and breaks completely. Together, these charm-soggy pieces have the cultural authenticity of Club Med. A Good Year is a gastro-real estate fantasy for those in business class, which describes the entire oeuvre of Peter Mayle, the author of A Good Year and a multitude of books charting his personal life-changing transition from advertising executive to France fetishist. According to the Mayle myth, no real people live in France, just quaint exotics who hang around fluffing the scenery to make visitors feel better about their own lives; it’s a nation of well-dressed cruise directors.
Mayle and Scott, who also has a modest weekend place in France, together conceived the idea for A Good Year before Mayle wrote the book. Crowe and Scott worked on Gladiator, and with all this holidaying machismo in the air, one imagines the gang in many serious, late night meetings, drinking $1,000 bottles of wine and butting heads over irrelevant details, all the while pretending they’re creating something that matters: “Would Max wear ugly tortoise shell glasses?” “Damn it, Scott! You don’t understand Max at all!”
Crowe works way too hard for light comedy; he’s sweaty and desperate where he should be sleek and carefree. He loses that barrel-chested command he so naturally possesses and replaces it with inexplicable twitching geekiness, delivering his dialogue at the rapid rate of a Gilmore Girl. As Crowe grinds away, this expensive celebration of the finer things in life comes more and more to resemble a party with no music, no dancing and cheap wine, or “plonk,” as the French say. Not even satisfying as mere eye candy, A Good Year is shot in a strangely jumpy style that makes it hard to see. A joie-less year in the la belle Provence.
A Good Year opens Nov. 10.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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