Good morning fellow oenologists and sommeliers,
Today we will be sampling a new tipple with a Swiss terroir. Lest you believe this particular vintage is not scary enough for the Halloween season be advised that the wine cask contains Death herself! Furthermore, deadly plague is spread, people rapidly age into skeletons, and even the innocent will not be spared.
We will be discussing “Death and the Winemaker” a Swiss French production first released in 2021. Death and the Winemaker (Le Vigneron et la Mort in the original French language) was directed and written by Victor Jaquier and produced by Arnaud S. Gantenbein with music by Kevin Queille. This nearly 17-minute long video was made by Imaginastudio in Lausanne, Switzerland, and co-produced by Radio Télévision Suisse. It was screened at several festivals in East Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.
The plot concerns a young man named Peter who created a wine so exquisite that even Death wanted a taste. The winemaker learns that Death is a powerful force, capable of manifesting as a small scorpion or as a gigantic skeleton figure with a void where her womb should be. He also learns that Death intends to claim the life of his fiancée Mathilde. Accordingly, he takes action and traps Death inside a cask of wine. This imprisonment of mortality saved his dear Mathilde, but eventually brought about ill consequences as people aged and became infirm yet did not perish. This suffering afflicted not only the winemaker and his wife, but also their entire community. The winemaker brought widespread misery into his community, the town he lived in, because he could not accept that Death was a necessary component of life.
The narrative was based on a traditional Swiss tale. Although, according to an interview with Victor Jaquier himself, the tale is “quite unknown” even in Switzerland. (NOTE: The February 2023 interview was conducted by Ramin Zahed for Animation Magazine. It can be read by clicking here.)
The 2-D animation used backgrounds painted on watercolor paper by Victor Jaquier himself. Additionally, he had a team of 19 animators and 10 clean-up artists. Altogether, including voice actors and the sound department, an entire orchestra, and the production team, Victor had a crew of 70 to bring his vision to life.
The art style was enjoyable and provided a dark setting well-suited to a horrific story.
Aside from brief scenes featuring the vineyard, most of the land appeared barren, more full of sharply pointed rocks than fertile and inviting farmland.
The men were portrayed in a manner that could be construed as ugly. They had inhumanly long noses, thin limbs too small to presumably hold anything beyond skin and bones, and, in the case of Mathilde’s father, poor dental health as demonstrated by wide gaps between relatively few teeth.
In contrast, Mathilde’s schnoz, her nose, was more reasonably depicted.
Regarding negatives, this was a short and simple tale. It depended on fairy tale logic which requires substantial suspension of disbelief. For example, once must accept that a common wooden barrel, built to hold wine, could contain an elemental force in charge of ending the lives of mortals. Still, that is a common ask when reading fairy tales. One must accept that only Cinderella‘s foot will fit the glass slipper, that Pecos Bill could use a snake to lasso a tornado, that Momotaro was born from a giant peach, etc.
The setting was medieval Switzerland within a French-speaking canton of that multilingual confederation. Whether or not the rest of the world was affected by Death’s absence was an open question, but beyond the scope of such folk stories. (SIDE NOTE: Did the Yoruba-speaking people of western Africa wonder why no one was dying anymore? Maybe they were unaffected because this “Death” was merely the assistant to the regional manager and only in charge of the winemaker’s town. 😉 )
Overall, this was a beautifully grotesque musing on the importance of Death, and an examination of how love can compel a man to make a rash yet understandable decision. Death and the Winemaker is recommended and can be viewed for free on YouTube at the ALTER channel by clicking here.
That’s it for today. Next week’s review will cover a sexually explicit clip featuring a witch who likes to shrink her victims. Until then do be sure to give Death her proper due.
This review was written by Solomon E and is protected under Fair Use copyright law.
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There She Grows 