Castle-Hughes re-unites with Caro and angels

Keisha Castle-Hughes has a thing for angels. After starring in The Nativity Story — where she was visited by the Archangel Gabriel — Variety says she will now star in an adaptation of Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck. To quote the Publishers Weekly review:

This imaginative story of the lifelong love between a man and an angel is the first of Knox’s five books to appear outside her native New Zealand. In Burgundy one midsummer night in 1808, Sobran Jodeau, then 18, climbs to the ridge of his father’s lands with two freshly bottled wines to lament his love troubles. Stumbling drunkenly, he is caught by the angel Xas, who smells of snow and describes himself “of the lowest of the nine orders. Unmentioned in Scripture and Apocrypha.” They share the bottles, and Xas promises that this night next year he will toast Sobran’s marriage?leading Sobran to believe Xas is his protector and guide. Sobran marries the woman whose family strain of insanity his father fears, marches with the Grand Army to Moscow, inherits his father’s vineyards and begins to prosper under his angelic “luck.” However, Xas proves far different from a guardian angel, and as years pass (the meetings on midsummer eve continue, with some exceptions, to 1863) their attachment shifts, severs then mends, as Xas’s complicated relationship with God and Lucifer gradually unfolds. . . .

The Amazon.com review adds:

The year is 1808, the place Burgundy, France. Among the lush vines of his family’s vineyard, Jodeau, 18 years old and frustrated in love, is about to come face to face with a celestial being. But this is no sentimental “Touched by an Angel” seraph; as imagined by Elizabeth Knox in her wildly evocative and original novel, Xas is equipped with a glorious pair of wings (“pure sinew and bone under a cushion of feathers”) and an appetite for earthly pleasures–wine, books, gardening, conversation, and, eventually, carnal love. . . .

The film will be directed by Niki Caro, who previously worked with Castle-Hughes on Whale Rider (2002).