Ray Pride

Jonathan Nossiter's made a couple of interesting fiction features (the gloomy "Sunday" and the fractured "Signs & Wonders"), but "Mondovino," a documentary about the shifts in sentiment and sediment in the twenty-first century world of wine, combines filmmaking with his original career, that of a successful New York sommelier. Coursing the planet with only a small video camera and several languages at his disposal, the sardonic Nossiter pits small-scale vintners against the corporate agents of change, capturing small, telling asides against aged Italian aristocrats from a lineage of centuries who still admire Mussolini, as well as consultants who advise making wines uniform worldwide, and the Wine Advocate's Robert Parker, who brags on his nose and palate in a cluttered home lorded over by his farting bulldog. In each vineyard he wanders, from France to Italy to California to Argentina, Nossiter also captures the local fauna, and like the animals, he's concerned with the local terroir, how the earth itself brings flavors forth as you live and grow and piss and shit there. It's assuredly an anti-globalization effort, but despite the concerted attacks of conservative voices and self-interested members of the wine community, "Mondovino" is also the portrait of one man's passion for how life ought to be lived better and how the local will always inform and improve what we think of as the universal. 135m. (Nossiter premiered a longer version at Cannes 2004, and is reportedly preparing both a television and DVD long-form project from his multitude of footage.)

"Mondovino" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2005-05-10)

Also by Ray Pride

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Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven" is many things, among them, a charnel house of parable
(2005-05-03)

Tip of the Week
Operatic, selfish, grandiloquent, complicated, self-loathing, self-loving, dark, sorrowful, "Don't Move" is a flashback-flashforward swamp of the swelter of one middle-aged man's love for woman, and not for the squeamish
(2005-05-03)

Tip of the Week
Alex Gibney's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" should rile up just about any sentient moviegoer in its portrayal of a multibillion-dollar fraud
(2005-04-26)

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(2005-04-26)

Glossed in translation
(2005-04-19)

Tip of the Week
(2005-04-19)

Burp of a nation
(2005-04-12)

The welcoming of chance
(2005-04-12)

Tip of the Week
(2005-04-12)

Tip of the Week
(2005-04-05)

Unconsummated
(2005-04-05)

Tip of the Week
(2005-03-29)

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