Brasserie Grain d’ Orge – Belzebuth 13%

A DEVIOUS NOVELTY, Belzebuth is one of those super-strength beers that wears its 13% ABV proudly on its collar like a laurel won in valorous contest. Yet despite its strength, rather rich golden hue, and finger-plus pile of foamy head, a glass full of Belzebuth is uncannily transparent. This is not necessarily to its detriment, as many ultra-strength beers exhibit symptoms of fermentation stress and unpleasant fusel notes that are unexpectedly absent from Belzebuth, at least in the aroma. Though clearly packing a massive dose of booze by beer standards, its nose is of clear pale grains, a touch of grass, with only a mild solventy undertone. A second pass reveals some Belgian-style yeasty esters emerging in a weirdly indistinct blend of sweeter fruit. Indeed, a sneakily transparent sweetness is the overarching element here—too pure to associate immediately with any fruit or traditional ester, one could almost overlook it at first. But once pointed out it casts a massive shadow over Belzebuth’s unassumingly bright presentation.

Still, the beer’s mouthfeel is more balanced than expected: sweet, yes, but not stuffed and chewy like a stout of comparable strength, still rather effervescent, and not entirely slick with alcohol. The sensation of alcohol warmth slides around the tongue but does not burn down the back of the throat (assuming it’s consumed cold enough) and the finish is deceptively clean.

This is the kind of naked strength one gets from adjunct brewing, and there’s no doubt that Belzebuth is boosted with dextrose, corn, and the like that contribute to its almost syrupy textures. The preservative E224 is used (assumedly, as its strength varies by market), which is known to kill off yeast and thus may be in part to blame (thank?) for the minimal yeast texture on the beer’s back end, despite being somewhat affiliated with the Belgian brewing tradition. This might leave one perplexed about the point of quaffing a transparent beer with such elevated alcohol if not just to get drunk, and that’s no simple question to answer….The devil’s dance, perchance?

Served: 12 oz bottle best before 19.10.14

Rating: 70 or 84 (depending on mood and/or state of inebriation)

Brasserie La Choulette – La Choulette Ambrée

PERHAPS THIS beer was merely amber once, but age has seen it deepen, darken, and take on a rhubarb cast that presages its earthy density. Its potent aroma strikes early with toffee malt and dried berries (e.g. prune), succeeded by an herbal prickle, slightly spicy hops, and sprinkle of musty yeast. The flavor unfolds in kind: at first sweet and earthy like a rustic cider with some woody depth, almost cloyingly chewy without being full-bodied, it then shifts towards juniper, herbs, and a savory undertone of malt vinegar before a slightly tannic finish. Hops are present in the mix, with bitterness coming less from alpha acids than the drying touch of herbs and earthiness so particular to this style.

Indeed, Ambrée is a tastefully authentic and matured manifestation of the Bière du Garde, conjuring daydreams of bucolic lowlands and rustic pantries from older epochs. Less fusty or barnyard twingy than some of its peers, the beer is still a delectably striking experience, rich yet somehow none too filling. The eggshell head froths when summoned by swirling but otherwise is restrained, and slightly elevated effervescence mingles with a touch of the 8% ABV fume towards the finish, though neither sensation is too pronounced. No doubt this would be a champion with rustic fare like Moules–frites or Coq-au-vin; also consider experimenting with gorgonzola and spinach-stuffed mushrooms or dolmades.

Served: 750 ml bottle (best before 26.11.15)

Rating: 93

Brasseries Kronenbourg – Kronenbourg Blanc

DESPITE THE STAMP of 1664 that it shares with Kronenbourg’s flagship lager, Blanc is a thoroughly 21^st century offering. Technically a Witbier, Blanc’s snazzy blue bottling and fruit-forward profile seem more oriented towards fans of wine coolers, alcopops, and shandies. Wits are already light, fruity, and marginally bitter, but Blanc tips the scales even further: its wheat spiciness is hard to trace, the floral hops quite fragile, and the fruit sweetness that leads the way is oddly peachy, replacing the orange or citric notes more typical for the style. Its body is a little heavier, too, and though its faint color and carbonation are both on-point, Blanc is too toothsome to be an inspiring light refreshment. Still a step up from Smirnoff Ice.

Served: 33 cl bottl

Rating: 74

Daron – Fine Calvados

A 40% APPLE BRANDY with a nose of tart early summer granny mixed with cellared and mulled cider. Some airier heather and grapey phenols underneath. Tenacious legs and a pale golden color. Palate-coating and thorough mouthfeel, but one that seeps in quickly with a bit of vinegar spark. Small amount of burn that quickly establishes itself and sits. Pleasant at first but gets a little hot and flatter later on, faintly charred and too young. To mix.

Rating: 78

Rémy Cointreau – Cointreau

40% ABV and comprised of alcohol, orange peel, and sugar, this is a liqueur of the most authentic and base triple sec lineage. Zesty but not too cloying aroma, pure transparent clarity in appearance. Smooth entry to the palate with a bright citric burst from the zest oils around the middle. Unambiguously orange in flavor, but no single variation dominates (i.e. clementine sweetness, naval tartness both evident). A bump of sweeter, more medicinal flavors as it is swallowed, with some slight candy in the finish. Potent and direct, if none too subtle, and best (and also better) suited to mixing than digestive uses.

Rating: 85

Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) – 1945

WHAT MORE TO SAY about this, one of film’s most complete pictures? Much, but little that has not been said before. ‘Les Enfants du Paradis’ is justly one of cinema’s most feted works, almost invariably appearing in the single digits of any French ‘Best-of’ list and surely competing with Renoir’s ‘La Règle du Jeu’ as one of the country’s most influential films. A three-hour epic set in 19th century Paris, ‘Children of Paradise’ establishes its foundation in actual historical personages of the theater district, ‘The Boulevard of Crime’, and there erects a monument to the stage itself and those unique souls who occupy it.

Vested with such rich characters, ‘Children of Paradise’ can absorb the glamor and sprawl of an American epic like ‘Gone With the Wind’ and inject it with political nuance, personal subtexts, and farsighted observations on human life that exceed all its contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. It is the segue between Romantic opera and the French Nouvelle Vague. The dire clashes of its archetypes take place on extraordinarily crafted sets, beneath precisely positioned spotlights, and with a budget unmatched to that time in French cinema. Too, the script abounds with intertwining metaphors—both spoken and visual— and a stable of self-referential catchphrases recur with extreme precision. But the film also bleeds brightly for the aspiring artiste, slips slyly through crowded city streets, and deploys a trenchant cynicism that belies its exaggerated staging. It breathes with liveliness and naked honesty, captured never so well as on the painted face of Baptiste the mime. His outcast suffering is not far different from that endured by the starry-eyed Michel in Godard’s ‘Breathless’, despite that director’s attempt to reject this film and its era as too mannered.

Although all performers here turn in iconic performances, Jean-Louis Barrault is the genius linchpin upon which everything turns. His face is uniquely proportioned and deeply expressive, matching a willowy frame that he contorts on stage like a ballet-dancing jester. His comedy always seems tinged with melancholy, as if he is too delicate to survive in this world, ground down between the ramrod nobility of the Comte Édouard and the nihilist subversion of the crook Lacenaire.

‘Children of Paradise’ also contains outward-looking subtexts that perhaps later eras of French cinema have tended to overlook in favor of passionate but self-absorbed character studies. Yes, the romance and sentimentality of relationships are at the heart of ‘Children of Paradise’, but not to the utter exclusion of other themes. Under the yoke of Nazi occupation, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert were obliged to couch their social commentary in the ‘simpler’ terms of historical costume drama and love triangles. To make a film of this stature in boom times would be achievement enough; to do it at a time of political censure, widespread hunger, and the omnipresent shadow of war makes ‘Children of Paradise’ all the more astonishing. Carné ‘s recollection of the production—prop food disappearing from tables, extras belonging to the Resistance being duped and abducted by Gestapo officers from the set—puts into perspective all modern directors’ complaints of pushy producers or tetchy stars. And so ‘Children of Paradise’, appropriately enough, is a testament to creation both upon the screen and outside of it. Woe that such enormity would frame its genesis, but joy that such passion saw it through.

Jules & Jim (1962)

EARLY IN ‘JULES & JIM’, the two namesake characters take a break from chummy sparring to catch their breath. Standing close to one another, the French Jim reads an excerpt of his memoir to his Austrian friend, Jules, describing a bond between two men so faithful and strong that it impressed all who knew them. ‘Don Quixote and Sancho Panzo’, these friends were called, so inextricable were they. And it is true—‘Jules & Jim’ opens with them already together, albeit newly met, and leaves neither alone until the end, some two decades after. Even when apart, first separated by a lover and then by The Great War, they always think on one another and long for a reunion. They are Oskar Werner (Jules) and Henri Serre (Jim)—the former slight, blonde, literary and a little clerical; the latter tall, dark, a deep listener. They have money enough to be carefree at night, but not so much that they don’t discuss professional ambitions or feel the sting of falling short. Not always alike, but sharing so strongly in values, interests, and decency, they would never tire in each other’s company. This is truly a rare bond.

Then comes a chance meeting of friends (or more accurately friends-of-friends), and suddenly there is Catherine, a mysterious woman with an uncanny resemblance to a statue that arrested Jules & Jim both with its beauty. Our omniscient narrator makes the characteristically trenchant (and inimitably French) observation of how both men are swept away by her. But it is Jules, with no lasting beaux in Paris, who makes his interest known. The two become lovers, and though Jim is soon drawn back into their mutual embrace, Jules’s quiet bidding stays with us: “…but not this one, Jim, ok?” And though their triangle begins sturdily with Jules and Jim its grounded corners, Catherine slides ever further from side to side and the geometry inevitably collapses.

Radiantly alluring, we can see how both Jules and Jim were rendered powerless by her. A particularly remarkable sequence briefly freezes her expressions ranging from joyful laughter to askance suspicion; she is perfect in each. But we can also see the dark circles beneath her eyes. They never leave her, even after years of secure marriage, a beautiful child, a doting husband, and a relaxed cabin life amidst Alpine foothills. If anything, these amenities deepened her unrest. She is the adult body of a beaten child—wary of all, desperate for love, and unable to accept it plainly when it comes.

Many have commented on the self-ascribed parallels between Jules & Jim, Don Quixote & Sancho Panza, and they do indeed hold strong in the halcyon days. Naturally, though, Catherine must become the windmill in this metaphor upon her arrival, and this is where Cervantes fails us. The dynamic between the three is too tragic, too fragile, and too romantic to be fulfilled by knights tilting at windmills. In their noble suffering, these two men are more akin to King Arthur and Lancelot, with Catherine their Guinevere. A friendship for the ages forged across borders, a fated love triangle, and even a war to separate them. And although Catherine was not the impetus for their battle, as Guinevere was in Camelot, she plays just as critically into their endgame. Stretching further (likely too far), we might even submit Sabine, Jules and Catherine’s daughter, as the Round Table: the product of Arthur and Guinevere’s union (being a gift of her father) and a noble symbol of their aspirations—but one not sustained by their deeds.

Even putting archetypal precedent aside, the characters in this film are so memorable as to fill almost any space of parchment given to write about it. Perhaps they are new archetypes of their own, for the enduring chivalry of the faith between Jules and Jim is indeed worth canonizing. But Truffaut, too, and his crew are worthy of mention, for myth without the magic of its environment is mere fiction. ‘Jules & Jim’ (admittedly based on a memoir much like Jim’s own) is raised beyond that, as Raoul Coutard’s camera follows the friends with such a disarming and intimate eye that we become the ampersand between them. The joie de vivre of the film’s first half is palpable and animated. During the costumed excursion the three make out in town (in part aided by the turn-of-the-century setting), it harks back to Chaplin shorts, where the end of a skit means happily ever after.

But in the second half, surrounded by pines and mist and bundled up to the chin in thick knit sweaters, these lovers three begin to tire. The pace of the film slows, becomes more reflective, and our narrator’s swift summaries, so effective early on, no longer suffice. This half of the picture begins almost to resemble the dreary Swedish play that so unimpressed Jules and Jim earlier in the film. (Catherine, of course, had loved it.) Balanced upon the fulcrum of The Great War—starkly shown in actual newsreel footage—the story slides from romance to ruin.

‘Jules & Jim’ was quite early in Truffaut’s career, coming just three years after his debut feature, ‘The 400 Blows’. It is perhaps more appealing to adults than that debut, being that it concerns them, their love lives, etc., instead of a child’s displacement. But exist-sensual angst is only shades from melodrama, and ‘Jules & Jim’ does push that line a little much whereas ‘The 400 Blows’ is relentlessly focused. The grave indecision of Catherine, drawn out as it is, begins to resemble the bed-hopping escapades of Therese, a young socialite the men meet early on and whose lifestyle the film satirizes on several occasions. And yet, this tiring feeling is but a fraction of Jules’s own mounting exhaustion and helplessness, and the film remains so beautiful to watch that no scene could easily be cut.

In a sense, at least Jules is spared by the film’s end. For her final charade Catherine invites Jim to join her in the car, and we are reminded of their missed rendezvous at the café years ago. She calls, ‘Watch us well, Jules!’ heads for a bridge, and puts a swift end to their lingering discontent. Obedient as ever, Jules watched. Would that he could ever have helped watching her; lucky for us that he did not.

The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) – 1959

FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT’S ‘The 400 Blows’, aside from being an extraordinary feature-length debut from a director not yet 30, is heralded today for opening the floodgates of the French New Wave. The film is a semi-autobiographical portrait of Truffaut’s own troubled youth, recast in an abbreviated form. His proxy and our protagonist is Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a boy of perhaps 13 whom we follow through hardships and revelry, but mostly the former. From exile behind the chalkboard in the corner of his schoolroom to the narrow foyer of his parents’ apartment where he sleeps, Antoine is beset by the frustrations of the adult world: his teacher’s apparent loathing for life and children, his parents’ crumbling relationship and lack of trust, his own lack of direction and cherishment. Throughout it all, he looks increasingly dour—and adult. On the one hand, Antoine’s parents, consumed by petty suspicions, squabbling in the kitchen adjacent to his improvised bedroom; on the other, a sea of oversized toddlers’ eyes enraptured by a puppet show. From each setting Antoine emerges with long strides into the streets, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his checkered jacket, growing taller. Eventually, and without knowing precisely why, he rebels, as any child might—falsifying his faithless mother’s death, running away for a night, plagiarizing his sudden hero Balzac—and is lashed back each time with increasing severity. The future does not seem to exist for him. After several limp efforts his hopeless, hapless parents remand his custody to a juvenile correctional facility where his visiting mother offers only dismissal and his one good friend, turned away at the door, can only shrug in silence and bike back down the road. Surrounded by misfits and vague custodians, Antoine is afforded no more love or attention than he received at home. So he flees, just as before.

Until this point, Antoine had existed in the regulated modern world—one of businessmen, of didacts, rules, habits, and prescriptions that he cannot abide. In this brief chase all that bondage is peeled away until he slips past his pursuers by hiding out beneath a bridge, like any of cinema’s fugitives on a jailbreak. Then Antoine turns at last to the road, a straight line away after a life spent in circles. As he jogs through the countryside, the camera tracks Antoine in a tight shot from the side: the road before him is unknown, that behind him immaterial. He runs for some time, and we with him. When his steps finally take him to the ocean—a sight he has never before beheld—without pause he carries on until the water laps over the soles of his shoes. Only the does he stop, casting about briefly before turning towards the camera, almost as if in succor, and his face is suddenly frozen.

This is the film’s final frame, and it is jarring. Ocean revelations are often protracted and broadly panning episodes that leave us feeling slightly eternal. ‘And this too shall pass,’ so to say. The audience might fill in the spots between Antoine’s frustrated youth and wherever they themselves might be today. His story would be somehow theirs. But those frozen eyes—guarded, questing, irresolute—deny us this indulgence. No time passes, and the 400 blows remain fresh. It is not quite a tragedy and neither a comedy, but in any event it remains living, not bottled up for reflection or recast for the nostalgic past.

This film’s companion piece in the New Wave genesis is Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’, which is full of romantic criminals and young epicureans whose curiosity about one another is an excuse to exercise their own solipsism. The film is similarly self-absorbed—spontaneous in some ways, highly stylized in others, and ultimately as much about the presentation as its content. We recall the faces of the characters involved and the intoxicating je ne sais quoi of their environment, but their myopic worldview makes empathy difficult. Truffaut’s characterizations here are more earnest, unadorned, and memorable.

Meanwhile, another semi-autobiographical film from a revolutionary director would emerge in Fellini’s ‘8 ½’ just a few years later. Naturally it is cut from a much different cloth than ‘The 400 Blows’, where self-reflection is inherent to its very premise. But that too smacks of a preening ego that Truffaut has completely circumvented. In a pleasing change of pace, this revolution occurred without seeming too aware of its own paradigm shifting. The techniques that Truffaut adopts—long dolly shots of natural street sets, a following eye enabled by handheld cameras, unvarnished characters played by real people without hours of makeup—are natural byproducts of the story he wants to tell, and not the learned tricks into which he shoehorns a studio committee-approved script. This freshness of genesis, of free-flowing life in a new cinema verite, could never again be recreated, for each wave beyond the first is not new, but merely next.

Caché (2005)

LIKE MOST MICHAEL HANEKE films, ‘Caché’ is worth watching for its supreme patience alone. By alternating between static tape footage and a director’s camera, Haneke must weave between worlds like a docu-dramatist. Half of our insight into ‘Caché’ comes from this tape footage, which the characters watch just as we do, but feels foreign and distinct from their personal lives. The other half stems from Haneke guiding the camera in a more traditional manner, enveloping the viewer like a character in the film that no one addresses, but everyone accepts. In this sense, Haneke’s commitment to his subject is absolute: no more explanation than is absolutely necessary, no winking close-ups on incriminating details, or a suggestive music bed to instruct us how to react. When we receive so much instruction on how to feel about a film, it becomes easier to stop feeling anything at all. ‘Caché’, conversely, grants us so few tips that we are compelled to pay attention.

And it is important to distinguish the film’s generosity with its tips (non-existent) versus other features: cinematography, pacing, a natural sense of dialogue, realistic characters portrayed by perfectly real people. In all these regard, ‘Caché’ is a treasure trove. But satisfaction—at least as defined in the traditional ‘whodunit’ tales—is absent. And this is part of the film’s point, since it is more a study of guilt than a mystery in need of a tell-all climax to show off its clever mastermind. Rather, Haneke shows off his cleverness by rejecting such a conclusion, deliberately not answering many of the questions he posed throughout the film, neither to us nor the characters themselves. And if this futility had been sold a little more thoroughly, ‘Caché’ would have been a complete instead of merely qualified pleasure. In teasing us for the entire film, only to yank away the prize and dance about with it for years to come (in coy interviews, etc.), Haneke seems to undermine his objectives. If ‘Caché’ is about guilt, not a solution, why drive the focus ever back to the perpetrator, and not the victim? As it is, our weary protagonist Georges suddenly exhausts all his investigative efforts and collapses into an ambiguous slumber, no more resolved than when he began. As do we.