A Good Year
Ridley Scott’s Provence holiday. That mix between Provençal real estate ads, eulogising sociopaths and casual chauvinism bordering on assault.
Some Patrick Bateman expy is the the talk of The City. Channelling Gordon Gekko, he does some borderline illegal deal and wins a forced holiday to cool off the heat.
Coincidentally, he inherits some Provençal château (complete with wine terroir), and as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, gathers he can flog it for a cool millions by papering over the cracks.
After reckless driving that could jail him for a while if he was poor, he meets Marion Cotillard, a local bistro owner. She shows her the damage his little stunt has done to her gluteus right there on the town square. 1-0 for classiness.
This is the kind of thing Americans think all French do, one of their little quirks like greeting each other with 3 kisses and topless strutting on the beach.
Our Bateman was an orphan that used to pass time with his uncle as a child, drinking wine and losing at tennis. He inherited his lust from uncle Albert Finney, because suddenly appears a bastard daughter wanting to find herself by finding her father, shoving her ass on his face. 2-0 for classiness.
Uncle Finney left no will, and this bird’s appearance complicates things. That can be a problem, since flogging other people’s property might be legally iffy. Again. The only thing to do is to pamper her and expect her to walk away. In vino veritas, so she also gets said to her face she is a fraud trying to fleece a château from hard-“working” aristocrats.
After returning from his forced sabbatical, he fucks over his lieutenant to secure his jobs and for potential illegalities gets kicked upstairs into a promotion by the boss.
Of course his time in France (and fucking over his summer fling, both literally and figuratively speaking) changed his from a corrupt cutthroat corporate samurai into a Cincinnatus crossed with Dionysus that moves to the countryside. He sells his London duplex and heeds the Call to Watching Other People perform Agriculture.
There’s also some subplot about an mythical bespoke wine that turns out to be done right there, hidden away in the middle of more bottles of shit wine.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.