E-Mail This Article to a Friend Wines and whines Mondovino and Independent Film Festival of Boston opener Lonesome Jim BY GERALD PEARY
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Jonathan Nossiter was horrified when, off a plane from Brazil, he arrived by cab from Logan at BU. I had arranged there a small screening of his new wine-around-the-world documentary, Mondovino, and I projected a DVD copy. It was like offering Miles a glass of merlot in Sideways. "Though I shot my film on digital, using a little Sony 150, the end result was to blow Mondovino up to 35mm," Nossiter told me. "The difference between DVD and 35mm is like looking at a photograph of a painting, then standing in front of the painting itself. What you saw was 60 to 70 percent of the film, but the other 30 percent is the most interesting aspect, like alchemy. If I taught a university class, I’d show the same film on VHS, DVD, and 35mm and let students absorb the experience."

But even 35mm isn’t what it used to be, he said. "The age of homogenization has affected film stocks. Old films have vitality. The new Kodak stock has a more homogenized light. There’s a relation between film, wine, society, and politics in the age of globalization. We’re on the edge of a global collapse."

Nossiter, whose successful American indie features include Sunday and Signs & Wonders, has moved to Brazil. "I come back here every six months, and every six months I feel more despairing. This country is sick. Still, I’m an optimist. Mondovino is fundamentally motivated by affection, though the world’s gone mad. It’s a film that has equal parts rage and tenderness."

Some have complained that Mondovino is too meandering and anecdotal and should be cut. "It’s a long film, it’s to my taste. I felt I was inside a Balzac novel. These ‘real people’ are characters out of fiction. I’d stepped from the semi-fictional world of my narrative films into other semi-fictional worlds. I tried to understand people in their environments. I’m not pretending that this film is neutral, objective. Being non-judgmental is incredibly pernicious, dangerous in today’s America."

What did Nossiter think off-camera of Robert Parker, the Maryland-based wine critic whose ratings have an extraordinary effect on wine sales, even in France and Italy? "I think he’s quite sincere, not corrupt in a regular sense. He sees himself as a liberator, a Nader’s raider." The documentarian still has trepidations about Parker’s taste and influence. "Your fellow countrymen view Parker’s portrait in Mondovino as incredibly flattering. When people tell me he comes out great in my film, my jaw drops."

Central to Mondovino is the positive idea of "terroir," of a meshing of history and tradition, an anchoring in the earth. For a winemaker, Nossiter explained, it’s affirming that "I’m going to make wine with a consciousness and an understanding of what went before." And in filmmaking? "It’s Pasolini and Cassavetes, whose ‘terroir’ is framed by the history of cinema. With Pasolini, it’s also a history of painting." And politics? "Bush is trying to sever all relations to the past. We live in a rigged system. Multiplexes are not choices. Reagan and Bush have destroyed all chances to be free, with politics, wine, and movies."

A BU freshman asked, "So the solution is awareness?" Nossiter nodded, then undercut his inflamed rhetoric. "Don’t trust Parker or me," he joked. "We’re both faux populists. I like the idea of populism, even if I’m the worst snob on the block."

THE INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL OF BOSTON ups its claim to be the Hub’s premium fest by getting the Steve Buscemi–directed Lonesome Jim, a 2005 Sundance favorite, for its April 21 opening night. We’re not talking macho blockbuster: you can’t get more unassuming than this small-scale character drama, yet it has a sweetness and quirky integrity. Jim (Casey Affleck) is a New York City dropout who, depressed at his loser status and failure as a writer, returns to his Indiana boyhood town to stew. Soon he’s back with his parents, and in his old room, which he plasters with pictures of authors — Hemingway, Woolf, Burroughs — who did themselves in. (It’s a literary script: Boston’s own alcoholic novelist, Richard Yates, stands among the anointed.) Jim’s family is a well-oiled thespian ensemble: Mary Kay Place (mom), Seymour Cassel (dad), Kevin Corrigan (unhappy brother). Even Liv Tyler shows acting chops as a local nurse who may or may not be unlucky Jim’s salvation.