The  first film that New Zealand director Niki Caro and Maori actress Keisha Castle-Hughes made together was Whale Rider which earned the latter an Oscar nomination. This, their second, is a rather different affair. Based on Elizabeth Knox's bestseller, it’s set in 19th century France and stars Jeremie Rennier as Sobran Jodeau, a peasant winemaker whose father works for the local baron and who believes he can make a better quality wine.  Unfortunately, the soil is unwilling. He’s also in love with local lass Celeste (Castle-Hughes), but the fact her dad started barking like a dog makes the villages thing she’s been cursed.

One night, however, Sobran meets an angel, the androgynous looking Xas (Gaspard Ulliel) and the two strike a deal. When he next returns, if Sobard’s married Celeste, Xas, who always seem to turn up clutching a bottle of vino,  will give him some tips about combining the soil’s qualities to bring out the wine’s best flavours. Sobard has to agree to meet him once a year.

As a bond of friendship forms between angel and winemaker, so Celeste starts having kids, Sobard goes into partnership with the late baron’s niece, Aurora de Valday (Vera Farmiga) and teaches her how to taste the feelings that go into the wine. Before long, they’re tuning out barrels of  top vintage plonk, but there’s also been a family tragedy, Celeste’s grown jealous and Sobard’s on the brink of betraying both her and his vines. At which point Xas drops a bit of a bombshell about his origins, the pair fall out and the grapes turn sour.

Firmly in the realms of magic realism, it’s a fable about how who we are informs the life we make, that corruption within produces corruption on the outside too just as honest purity gives rise to the sweet wine of life. As such there’s some evocative poetic imagery, but the film itself is all rather muddled, not least in the homo-erotic subtext that bubbles up in the relationship between man and angel. Although Farmiga stands out, Castle-Hughes doesn’t really have a great deal to do and Rennier never really engages sympathy as the good man suffering from his own pride and desires.

There’s some nice flavours as with the scene where a blindfolded Aurora learns to detect the flavours in the wine, but with a gradual descent into melodrama it eventually becomes corked.