The career of Eric Rohmer is filled with one exquisite masterwork after another. But for a wine lover, Autumn Tale (Conte d’automne, 1989) is perhaps the essential film: a delicate romantic comedy about middle age, it is set among the vineyards and farms of the Rhone valley: Here are people for whom wine is the beginning of many a conversation, many a deliberation and even many a relationship. The same might be argued of Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, one of his most enjoyable late comedies precisely because it’s so close to Rohmer in its calm, somewhat detached analysis of love’s adventures and mistakes: There is a great deal of wine drunk in that movie as a prelude to lovemaking, but for the most part it’s a matter of American girls getting drunk and losing their inhibitions to dazzlingly erotic Spaniards. I don’t think Allen himself gives a hoot about what anyone is drinking.
Autumn’s romance, which blossoms only late in the film, begins a with a glass of 1989 Cote du Rhone drunk at a wedding: a businessman, well north of 40, samples a wine. Eagerly beside him stands the vigneron herself, Magali (Béatrice Romand)—she’s a middle-aged widow and, as is so often the case in Rohmer, not only prickly but indefatigably, combatively articulate. The gentleman, Gérald (Alain Libolt, who looks like a more elegant, sensitive Bob Dole), tells her it’s aging very nicely, and compares it favorably to a Gigondas he had with lunch the day before. Magali is elated. This is a triumph: We’ve already learned that, as a woman who practices principles that are essentially biodynamic, Magali plants a low yield, doesn’t use pesticides and doesn’t weed between the rows in her fields. As a result her fields are a bit of a mess, like her great windblown crown of dark hair. Her refusal to weed, she tells her friend Isabelle (Marie Rivière), has earned her the ridicule of her neighbors, but she doesn’t care. Well, we know this is mere bravado. She may also pretend that she’s indifferent to having a lover, but she cries to Isabelle about her loneliness and the burden of running the place alone.
This encounter at the wedding, in fact, is Isabelle’s doing. Isabelle has found Gérald—the son of a vigneron, incidentally—for Magali. Isabelle, who is married, took out a personals ad—but, this being Rohmer, she has allowed a small, reckless bit of guile to worm its way into her generous impulse. She initially pretends to be Magali—to protect her, she finally confesses to Gérald—yet she seems to enjoy lightly flirting with him at leisurely lunches in the local towns.
These sort of devices, which could be played very broadly, with Rohmer unfold with a Mozartean clarity: Happiness is usually, ultimately arrived at in movies like Autumn (it’s one of four with a seasonal theme), but the film is not about the contrivances that drive its leisurely narrative. It’s about how Rohmer’s characters use (or misuse) their often overfine philosophical and moral intelligences to reach their ends. And, unlike Vicki Christina, wine never muddles anyone’s thinking. You get the sense, rather, that an opened bottle stimulates the intense deliberations of these characters.
The film ends with a party celebrating Magali’s harvest—her concerns about her crop nearly kept her from attending the wedding—and if you follow this final scene all the way through the credits, you’ll see a wonderfully revealing moment—just a somewhat bemused but genuinely regretful glance—that reveals Isabelle’s true feelings.
Rohmer is too subtle an artist to dwell on the metaphor of the vineyard, of the growing and gathering in of a life, but it’s there, anyway. Magali’s vineyard has a beautiful, simple richness, shot often in the high sunlight of afternoon rather than the prettifying gold of late day: The air is full of insects, but also the buzz of planes and cars. Not too far off, the monumental shapes of the Tricastin nuclear towers are unavoidable monuments on the horizon. In Rohmer’s eyes they are not necessarily hideous— Gérald, we learn, is fond of industrial architectute: They are just there, the work of man amid the word of nature.
Here is a modest biography (less than two-hundred pages, plus notes) that can be gulped down without losing any of its fizz. Tilar J. Mazzeo’s life of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot’s ascension and lasting success as a commercial titan is a lively, smoothly written history that can be recommended for anyone wanting to know about the birth of the global Champagne market in the 19th century.
The Widow Clicquot inherited her husband’s business by the time she was 30—he died of typhoid, presumably, although he had a depressive streak, and Mazzeo doesn’t altogether rule out the rumors that he may have committed suicide. His widow, on the other hand, was an indominatable woman who lived on and on (she was 89 when she died in 1866), and saw her Champagne concern grow and grow. The key to her initial success was the Russian market—Möet and then later Pommery had a better grip on Britain—although the endless ups and downs of trade during the Napoleonic wars meant that her market often threatened to vanish overnight. Her shrewd gamble (and it was a gutsy one) was to secretly send a huge shipment to Russia just as peace was achieved in 1814. By not waiting for the formal lifting of trade embargoes, she found a country ready to celebrate with her Champagne, and zero competition. Mazzeo relates Clicquot’s perilous international challenges especially well—sprintingly—and her discussion of Champagne technique is also blessedly painless. That’s no small feat.
But there are a few bubbles to pop. This isn’t a very deep study—the depth, one might say, is closer to a coupole than a flute. Mazzeo is stuck with the fact that there’s little solid detail about Clicquot’s daily life, or thoughts or beliefs. No diary, no memoir, and not many remembrances from third parties. She was a celebrated name, but not a celebrity. One way to deal with this would have been to create a tapestry of denser textural detail around Clicquot. Mazzeo writes, for example, that references to Clicqout Champagne are to be found throughout classic literature—why then relegate examples to the notes section? Why not weave them into the book itself?
Mazzeo instead falls back on novelized touches of speculation: In a breathless opening rendered with rich cinematic feel, little Barbe-Nicole is rescued from her convent school and smuggled back to her anxious, prosperous family through seething Revolutionary crowds in the streets of Reims. The only problem is that, as Mazzeo admits, this may actually have been Barbe-Nicole’s sister. Oh. She often pauses to have Clicquot savor a moment of domestic feeling or social power as if she were a cougar out of Danielle Steele: “Barbe-Nicole caught the twinkling, knowing eye of her father across the room and she smiled back at him wryly.” Not implausible, although what’s to say she didn’t turn and suppress a gassy Champagne burp? I could have used a little more of Balzac’s hard glint of ambition and money. Mazzeo cites the reminiscence of a man who met the ancient Widow near the end of her life: ”a dwarfish, withered old woman … whose soul was in business, scanning over each day to her last the ledger of the commercial house to which she had given her name.” Mightn’t this be the true Widow Clicquot practically from the getgo?
There’s no real reason to anchor this post with a photo (courtesy of Showtime) of Michael C. Hall in Dexter, except that the show is set in Miami, where we visited recently—and surely the Chamber of Commerce won’t complain about having an exceptionally attractive serial killer serve as a poster boy for their city. We could have used Jackie Gleason, I suppose, but where are the sex and sizzle in that?
What a gorgeous relief from the Manhattan skyline in winter. In Miami, you have the jeweled aquamarine tones of the water and, along all the shores, shiny new buildings touched with bursts of colored light at night: It’s like a city that somehow got into its head that it was really a cocktail bar.
New York had Robert Moses. Miami seems more like a resort dreamed up by the owner of Moss (a Manhattan hallmark of the Vivosian lifestyle). Playfulness, frivolity and prettiness were key accents of two hotel-lobby “scenes” Aldo and I investigated on a balmy, moonlight-saturated Friday. First was the new Mondrian on West: The concept is a consciously mod white-on-white fantasy of smooth gleaming molded plastic/fiberglass. Near the front entrance, where Aldo was stunned by the Gatsybesque sheen of someone’s parked Rolls convertible, one found an inspiredly silly automat, bathed in fuchsia light, selling jewelry, T-shirts and a paperback of The Valley of the Dolls (which, in case you didn’t know, is the source of our Patty Duke photo up top). In the main area, chandeliers were hung within giant golden bells. Moving outside, we were delighted with the poolside “umbrellas,” a sort of Jeff Koons sight gag: they were shaped into enormous table lamps.
The revelers were young and gorgeous and loud, except for one or two very old exceptions who were vigilantly lacquered and cossetted and watchful. If this scene ever gets old, it will be like them. It will be Liberace. How sad.
Next we hopped over to the renovated and recently reopened Fountainebleau, where we had a nightcap in the exquisitely tiled front room of Scarpetta (it has a sister restaurant here in Manhattan). The atmosphere there was somewhere between waterfront dock and Milanese fashion house. The Fontainebleau, designed by Morris Lapidus and opened in 1954, boasts an eye-seducingly luxe interior so full of polished stone, gleaming detail and undulating curves it suggests a Taj Mahal created to house the remains of Marilyn Monroe. The crowd wasn’t as hip as at the Mondrian, but the sense of space and flow and stone-cooled air were irresistible. (The Mondrian’s lobby-level staircase, by the way, seems to be an homage to the Fontainebleau’s famous “Staircase to Nowhere.”)
The newly popular Design District, oddly enough, didn’t offer nearly as much high-design amusement: it felt distinctly emptied out and Edward Hopperishy. But we enjoyed a very good meal outdoors there at Michael’s Genuine: The skirt steak came with a memorably rich green-olive aioili that I wanted to smear over everything, my forearms included. A few nights later, straight up Key Biscayne Boulevard by another forty blocks, we found our favorite meal at Michy’s. Aldo had a salad with beans and walnuts that he said was one of the best he ever had in his long and terrifyingly eventful life.
We always have lunch at that Little Havana mainstay, Versailles, which in its own décor of chandeliers and paneled mirrors is just as impeccably overdesigned as the Mondrian or Fontainebleau: What makes it real, and appealing, are the waitresses. They seemed a bit tired and frayed, in the old Thelma Ritter manner, but brought the huge portions without fuss and without attitude.
Now we are back in New York, and missing it all. But we DVRed season three of Dexter, and we’ll settle for that.
Some people like to draw their own holiday cards—Aldo sketches seasonal labels for wines that exist only in his mind. The reindeer looks as if it were developing a headache from the bulk of its antler vines.
At any rate, there was no lack of bustle at chef Michel Richard’s Central, on Pennsylvania Avenue. I’d eaten before at his acclaimed Citronelle, in Georgetown. This new restaurant—a James Beard winner—is a casual nouveau bistro designed to move the crowds in and out.
The first impression wasn’t altogether favorable: The atmosphere was closer to loud than energetic, and in scale the room is long and boxy, as if it were a holding cargo for tourists famished after a day traipsing up and down the Mall. The blandly tasteful architecture of the squat corporate buildings just outside the door seemed to have swept in with the evening and rearranged itself as decor.
But, as they say nowadays, no worries. The food came with a quickness that was potentially disconcerting, but visually the dishes were enticing creations—just the right amount of fuss—and, better yet, on the palate they were warmingly robust and tasty: Our friend Diana, who joined us, thought her cassoulet was a bit dry, yet it was undeniably a handsome dish for winter, with a plump duck leg sitting neatly on a mound of beans in which the sausage was concealed like holiday coins. And my beef cheeks with tagliatelle were absolutely delicious, rich but not cloying—and amusingly presented as two columns, one of the meltingly tender medallions of beef, the other of the pasta, folded over neatly, with shaved carrots sprinkled down the middle.
The bread, by the way, was terrific as well, and a traditional salad of frisee, lardons and poached egg was very satisfying.
Given the heartiness of the fare, our server recommended we drink the Dom. Ligneres “Aric” from Corbieres, France, which I’d never had. We found the wine to be big and dusky and, regrettably, an uninspired, one-dimensional match for the sophisticated comfort food from the kitchen.
The wine list was dominated by California and French wines with a smattering of Italian, Austrian and Spanish labels. I noticed some interesting reasonably priced gems: a Chablis from Dom. Bernard Defaix, a pinot blanc from Marcel Deiss, a reisling from Dom. Weinbach, a Givry premier cru from Michel Sarrazin, a cabernet franc from Frederic Mabileau, a gamay from Christophe Pacalet, a syrah from Dom. du Tunnel and a banyuls by the glass from Dom. de la Rectoire. Central also offered by the glass a Cremant d’Alsace brut rosé from Lucien Albrecht.
So: We came away sated and pleased, if not quite relaxed—maybe that’s Washington?
Also, if I can momentarily join those tourists traipsing up and down the Mall: We visited the new World War II Memorial, a spectacularly unimaginative site that, apart from access ramps, looks conservative enough to have been first sketched around the time of the Potsdam conference. With its funereal iron wreaths and dancing waters, it looked like a forlorn little postmodern joke on Il Vittoriano, the enormous Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome. Grrr!
