Netflix announced it in March instilling great expectation and anticipation and many, including enthusiasts "vinophiles" and experts, carved out an evening of quarantine to enjoy this film that promised to immerse us in the scents of must and the poetry of vineyards and great bottles.
The Sommelier tells the story of Elijah (Mamoudou Athie) a young man living in Memphis, dividing his time between the family restaurant and his passion for wines.
Decisive for him is the meeting with Tanya (Sasha Compère)which prompted him to follow his passion and enrol in the sommelier academy. Making things difficult, however, is the strong contrast with his father Louis (Courtney B. Vance)who planned to bequeath the family business to his son.
At the centre of the whole story is the stormy relationship with an impossibility of dialogue between father and son, while the female characters, not only young Tanya, but also Elijah's mother, Sylvia (Niecy Nash)They represent the ability women have to mediate, to support and to look beyond.
Apart from that, however, the film written, directed and co-produced by Prentice Penny, In his debut behind the camera, although it flows quite well, even managing to combine lighter and more poignant moments in a pleasant way, it remains somewhat on the surface, especially with regard to the wine aspect.
The film recounts the difficulty and the courage it takes to make life choices and to pursue one's dreams, it recounts the sacrifices and renunciations that must necessarily be made in order to take flight, it also recounts the defeats that teach one to start again with greater awareness and the importance of affection as an indispensable baggage to face everything. If the music hip hop and R&B by Hit-Boy make the vision enjoyable, rejuvenating the common imagery that wants wine to be associated with only classical or jazz musicThe scent of wine is missing, which remains a frame for the events without, however, giving the spectator what he perhaps expected and what the
title announced strongly.
La sommelieritudine is just a fascinating pretext and the detour to France a brief and even somewhat pandering parenthesis. Perhaps the director is a wine enthusiast or perhaps he wanted to touch a chord that is very dear to many today. winelover scattered around the world, but which exposes itself, even if it doesn't want to, to the inflexible judgments of those who are used to 'vivisecting' wines with a know-it-all attitude, and thus to an inevitable own goal.
The fact of the matter is that Prentice Penny's is a film to be seen, or even seen again, on an evening without too many expectations. To put it in the language of wine, it is a film that is fairly clear in its plot, intense in its sentiments, not very complex in its structure, not very consistent and not very persistent, weak, immature, sweet and light, fresh and not very tannic, fairly harmonious... easy to drink
English 
Italian