Les Trois Tomates
2022 · 3m · Germany
Directed by Martin Miron
Genres: biography, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
A portrait of winemaker Guenter Hutter, who abandoned the modern world for a vineyard in southern France, where creating, sharing, and enjoying wine — named for the three tomatoes once used as paperweights on his notes — has become a decelerated way of life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Three tomatoes as paperweights on a winemaker's notes—sure, it's poetic, but this is fundamentally a soft-focus lifestyle doc, the kind of thing that makes contrarians groan; it knows exactly what it is and asks for nothing more than your aesthetic surrender.
Miron situates this portrait within a long lineage of essayistic documentary—the contemplative gaze of cinema turned inward, toward ritual and craft—and the restraint to name the work after forgotten paperweights rather than the man himself is the kind of formal decision that reveals a filmmaker thinking carefully about tradition.
The singular move here is the decision to anchor the entire sensory experience on three inanimate objects: those tomatoes become the film's emotional hinge, a small formal choice that collapses the distance between paperweight and metaphor, allowing Miron to say everything about deceleration without narration.