Tourism-oenological Discourse on the Aura in A Good Year by Ridley Scott

Abstract

This essay follows fits into an ongoing project dedicated to highlighting the rhetorical and ideological representations of food and wine in cinema It carries out a semiotic analysis of the film A good year (by Ridley Scott, with the aim of identifying the role that wine plays in it and in the touristic imaginary about it. The essay pursues this goal by facing the issue of authenticity in tour ism as posed by Culler and by reconstructing the implicit aesthetic and touristic theory on which the film may be positioned. Then, it proceeds by getting into a reconstruction of the ideologic role played by the settings and the spaces represented in it. A spatial dialectic among city and country gets outlined which will allow to identify two competing forms of life one metropolitan, the other related to the living in the country. By highlighting the differences among them, the article seeks to define th e terms of the proposal which eno tourism makes to the urban citizen tempted of visiting wine lands. Moreover, the analysis will highlight how the film takes position in a wider discourse on how to assess the trip, raising the issue of how to behave in fac e of the transformation of identity that one may experience during his “How to think the trip? As a “ from ordinary life that once concluded may be dismissed or as a transformation which aims at being taken seriously and assumed definit ely and indefinitely? The incertitude which the protagonist will fall into about whether to move in the French countryside or getting back in his context of life gets solved by means of an explicit discourse on the aura and on the role which perception and aesthetics should play in everyday life, that is the actual core of the proposal carried by the film and by the touristic ideology of wine that may be recognized in it.