If you’re already familiar with Louis Feuillade, his little-known opus Vendémiaire may come as a surprise. Unlike the bulk of his work which was characterised as ‘Fantastic Realism’, Vendémiaire is wonderfully down-to-earth realism – or down-to-French-earth realism to be specific. The film itself is divided into four chapters, the titles of which (Prologue; The Vine; The Wine Casks; and Le Vin Nouveau) suggest that this is a movie about the cultivation and consumption of wine. But as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that the cultivation and consumption of wine is an allegory for French culture and French land as a whole, and the real purpose of the film is to persuade the director’s fellow citizens to defend that spirit and those lands at all costs. It’s September 1918 and the war is coming to an end, but here on the Castelviel estate in the south of France the news has not yet arrived and everyone is busy with the grape harvest. Many of the characters we meet are refugees who have been driven from their homes by the conflict in the north. Then there’s Father Larcher and his two daughters, and Pierre Bertin, a wounded soldier on convalescent leave, who are all locals. And living amongst them, disguised as Belgian farmworkers, are Wilfrid and Fritz, two escaped German prisoners whose malevolent presence makes life difficult for a local gypsy family and threatens the tranquillity of the community as a whole. Vendémiaire is a compelling drama which portrays a harvest season during a time of war with great authenticity and detail. It’s also a rousing hymn to Lunel, the beautiful bucolic village where Feuillade was born. More interestingly, it is a blatant bit of propaganda designed to rouse the French into a last-ditch effort to end the war on top. “Our joie de vivre and our love of wine and our exquisite landscape is who we are”, says the unsubtle subtext, “and that barbarian ‘Fritz’ must never be allowed to get his hands on our grapes”.

Karl Wratschko