Obsessão Vermelha

"Red Obsession" makes the viewer appreciate the true artistry involved in wine making, and the asomatous beauty involved in wine tasting (ordering wine at the Olive Garden is not wine tasting.) Drinking a good wine can be an orgasmic physical experience, as well as a genuinely spiritual one. Some of the interviewed eloquently describe an exquisite wine as an enduring experience.

The scenic views of French countryside and century-old vineyards are astounding. "Red Obsession" has some of the most spectacular cinematography this reviewer has ever seen. This alone is a very good reason to watch.

The film eventually moves into the current politics of the luxury wine industry. The epicentre of this business is currently China, which is now the largest importer of Bordeaux wines in the world. The rest of the film can be summarized in a sentence spoken by one of the commentators: "When the Chinese buy the wine, they buy the wine as a symbol of their status." The film's content, which includes exploration of the shifting market, and the changing production and consumption of premier château wines, was very informative and interesting to this uncultivated viewer. But the film is as untroubled as the well-off Chinese in it, who think nothing of dropping tens of millions of dollars buying wines, creating connoisseur clubs, or purchasing antiquated French chateaus.

Overflowing with conceit and extravagance, "Red Obsession" turns out mostly shallow and pretentious. The film doesn't ask any questions, or challenge conventional thinking, or break any new ground. Yes it is a documentary, but it is not constructive filmmaking.

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This is a documentary for wine lovers. Beer drinkers need not apply.

The film is tastefully done, great photography, beautiful soundtrack. Needs to be watched with a glass of red wine in hand, as it really whets your appetite.

Should it go deeper into the subject? Should it explain that the great French Wine Blight did NOT make the 1855 classification obsolete, because the vines were grafted to Chilean roots (resistant to the phylloxera) imported hastily in thousands, to save them (not only in France, but in other parts of Europe too)?

Maybe. That would have made for a slightly longer film, perhaps more thrilling (Will the vines be completely lost? Who could save them? Wait! Up in the sky: it's a bird... it's a plane... No, it's super-vine! Actually, it was "la super viña", from Chile).

But it would have been a different film, missing the elegant balance of this one.

Perhaps this film's success will spur a sequel: "Red Obsession 2 - Attack of the insects from Hell". It will need a different soundtrack (by Hans Zimmer?) and a different narrator; Russell Crowe is too mellow for that!

I like to enjoy a decent wine. I don't drink a Château Latour or a Château Lafite Rothschield simply because I can't afford them, but If I could, I believe I would once in a while delight myself with such an exquisite occupation. It is strange however, after watching this movie, that my sympathy and respect for red wine didn't increase. In fact, it decreased for a moment.

This documentary is totally hollow. You squeeze it and nothing comes out. You learn virtually nothing about nothing and you are fed with the usual clichés and prejudices about the new economic giant known as China, its people and the globalized world.

The cinematography is also one of the most boring I remember to have witnessed in years. This incipient self-centered director, insists in punching you over and over, again and again, with bird views of French chateaus and never ending vineyards, intercalated with interviews so empty, so senseless, so snobbish, that you start to feel a certain discomfort, even disgust.

Everything tastes very thin, very superficial, very made out of plastic, unlike the Bordeaux wines that deserved a much serious and better documented approach.

The only positive note about this waste of time was the narrator's voice, lent by Russel Crowe.

It's technically not bad... I just get frustrated when documentaries seem to stumble into really fascinating territory and then quickly back out to go back to what they (likely) planned.

Exploring what drives people to bid money on things like super expensive wine (some of whom admit they don't even drink it!) is potentially really fascinating. Is it appealing like gambling? Is it selfish? It is an empty display of wealth that, upon reflection, such auction participants would feel guilt about?

And the notion of fraudulent luxury goods? Genuinely fascinating! Questions about whether not knowing the difference means the real things are meaningless, whether you can be happy with fakes, whether it turns people off even trying to get the genuine things...

But nah. The documentary is solid but entirely too straightforward to be more than sporadically (maybe even unintentionally) interesting in an intense way for more than a few moments here or there.

Oh well.

You might think the movie is about wine but it's not. It's about the transformation of China and it uses the dusty old traditional wineries of France to highlight just what is going on. The Chinese became obsessed with fine vintage wines, in particular the Rothchild Lafite Bordeaux wines. You don't have to be a wine lover to enjoy the movie. The one quote I will always remember, that the Chinese have endured the cultural revolution which is like going to hell and coming back alive. They have endured living like peasants for decades and now that they are not, they want to live it up like a sir. The picture of China that is presented in the film is one that is super modern, trendy, and really fast paced. Money is everywhere. But this is a double edged sword, as you will find out in the movie. They could have swapped Lafite for BMW's or iPhones, but the Lafite is an excellent symbol of fine old stuffy European tradition coming head on to the Chinese economic juggernaut. This movies picks a single story to convey the seismic shift in economic pull that has happened in the last decade.