tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

Niki Caro's upcoming The Vintner's Luck, based on the novel of Elizabeth Knox, remains tMF's most anticipated movie of 2009. We're finalizing the draft of Part 3 of this series, and due to insistent demand from our viewers, we're once again putting the spotlight on the movie's two major characters- the angel Xas (played by Gaspard Ulliel) and Sobran, the winemaker (portrayed by Jeremie Renier).

Choosing the Actors: We were ecstatic when we heard that Gaspard Ulliel was to play Xas, an interesting and very controversial character. With the much-hyped casting news about Twilight's Edward Cullen (Ulliel was rumoured to have been shortlisted...) being 'over and out', it's nice to know that the French actor has captured a highly interesting role, and one that many of his fans will be excited about.

Equally awesome news is that Jeremie Renier will be playing Sobran Jodeau, the other lead character.

GASPARD ULLIEL is French cinema's rising star, repeatedly honored in the category of most promising actor. But playing his first leading role, opposite Emmanuelle Béart in André Téchiné's ''Strayed,'' he seems fully arrived, showing us the facets of a complex and mercurial character like a blackjack dealer shuffling a deck of cards.

In the course of their meetings and missings, Xas never does become a counselor, although he is, in turn, Sobran's tempter, friend, lover, child, succubus and storyteller. And he is always a haunting physical presence, draining Sobran's desire away from his wife, mistress and children, even from his thriving vineyard. In ''The Vintner's Luck,'' meetings with an angel provide neither guidance nor illumination nor moral clarification: they are simply so consuming, physically and imaginatively, that they make ordinary life impossible.

Xas is one of the best angels since William Blake's. He is not a pet, like Clarence in ''It's a Wonderful Life,'' or a pest, like the angel who crashes through the ceiling in Tony Kushner's ''Angels in America.'' His nature partakes simultaneously of the devilish and the sublime. The heaven and hell he describes, the afterlife he comes to understand, do not contradict the traditional imagery, yet Xas's descriptions of them exude a cruel strangeness. This vessel of fragile power is indeed a messenger -- the Greek origin of the word ''angel'' -- but he cannot make us, or himself, understand his message.

In a way, Xas seems to be the author of the novel as well as its subject. ''I hate the connective tissue in a story,'' he proclaims loftily -- and so, apparently, does Knox. ''The Vintner's Luck'' is constructed episodically, with its principal action a series of revelations. When these revelations concern Xas they are chilling, but when they touch the human characters they are surprisingly perfunctory.

"L'Enfant," which won the Golden Palm at Cannes 2005, is the new film by the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, whose "The Son" (2002) made such an impact; audiences were moved in a deep, rare way. The Dardennes do not make morality tales. Their character Bruno is not aware that what he does is good or bad. He is unformed. There is a scene where he and Sonia tussle playfully in a car and then romp outside in a park like a couple of kids. Does he love her? Love is outside his emotional range. He takes money, spends it, doesn't even cultivate the persona of a hustler. He is that most terrifying kind of human being, the one who doesn't feel ordinary emotions or even understand that other people do.

Sobran is less a credible character than a robust hypothesis. He makes a good straight man for his angel, but his spiritual, sexual and domestic conflicts have little intensity. While Sobran suffers and fumes, we wait for Xas to return. It is difficult to care about Sobran's parents, his children, his brother, his friends; all are given forgettable traits that fade before Xas.

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