Just after midday I get to Actor’s Studio cinema via the lobby of the Floris Arlequin Grand Place Hotel.

The box office lights are on, but the phone is ringing unanswered.

When I try opening the door to the cinema, it is locked.

So I abandon my attempt to buy a ticket in advance for this afternoon’s 3 p.m. screening of Dany Boon’s Nothing to Declare, titled Rien à Déclarer in the film’s original French language.

To console myself, I make the two-minute walk from the cinema to La Maison de Toone at Impasse Shuddeveld to grab a beer or two.

I love the approach to Toone along a narrow cobbled medieval alley that oozes historical atmosphere.

A friendly brown cat inside Toone checks me out and miaouws as I peruse the beer list by the entrance.

The cat then comes and sits next to me on my wooden bench while I drink a refreshing Ciney Blonde beer.

I admire the fabulous interior of old wooden ceiling beams, brick walls and tiled floor.

Wonderful marionettes hang from the ceiling.

A puppet knight on a horse stands on a shelf to my right, just above the fireplace.

Faded posters from past puppet theatre performances adorn the walls. These are indications of Toone’s dual life as a puppet theatre and as a bar. When you enter the place, you go left for the puppet theatre and right for the ‘estaminet’ or bar.

A cool breeze wafts in through the open door.

It is remarkably quiet and peaceful in here, given that Toone is only five minutes walk from tourist-thronged Grand Place.

The Ciney Blonde which I am finishing off has a pleasing fruitiness without being overly sweet. It’s very refreshing.

The second beer I have here is completely different, and more of a challenge to the novice palette. It is Oud Beersel, a Flemish Brabant gueuze served in a green wine-shaped bottle.

I pour it too quickly and get a glass full of foam that takes a couple of minutes to subside.

I’m in no hurry so I don’t mind the wait.

When I finally glug it down I am struck by this drink’s tangy sharpness and similarity to wine rather than beer.

Oud Beersel has a strong distinctive flavour and a mouthfeel very different to any beer I have had before.

With this my first gueuze I get the feeling I have just unlocked the door to a parallel beer universe.

“C’est un lieu bien calme”, comments a passing French tourist who peers in to Toone but doesn’t enter.

He is right, it is a peaceful spot right now.

I have the estaminet to myself, apart from the cat who is sitting here happily and occasionally getting up for a leisurely wander round the premises.

After finishing the Oud Beersel, I leave Toone and go for a random pre-film wander.

You have got to admire Brussels’ offbeat sense of humour.

Not only does the city have as its best known icon a statue that urinates at you, in the shape of the Manneken Pis, it also has a drinking fountain on Rue de la Tête d’Or in which a sculpted figure leans forward with his arms crossed and spews water from his mouth like he’s casually throwing up after a night of heavy drinking.

I drag myself away from this bizarre vomiting statue and head towards Boulevard Anspach, where I hear some great salsa sounds emanating from El Metteko restaurant.

I’ll come here for a meal some other time.

I’m not hungry at the moment so I wander on towards Place Saint-Géry, where a very short stretch of the Senne river is visible.

The water is very clear. Coins are clearly visible on the riverbed.

Saint-Géry used to be an island, until the Senne was built over and covered during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Someone has stuck an ‘Obama 08’ poster in a nearby apartment window.

Returning back across Boulevard Anspach, I come across well known purveyor of French fries Friterie Tabora.

Tabora is one of a series of establishments clamped along the base of Église Saint Nicolas like a strip of barnacles on a ship’s hull.

For some reason I feel drawn towards Rue de la Bourse, which is how I happen upon The Collector Record Gallery.

This is a great record store.

It stocks vinyl mainly but also a good selection of Miles Davis on cd from which I buy Early Miles Vol 1, a collection of radio broadcast sessions from the period 1946 to 1953.

The recording quality is rough and almost unlistenable at points, but the music is fantastic.

Highlights include ‘Webb’s Delight’, ‘Farewell Blues’, ‘Focus’, the gorgeous intimate ‘That Old Black Magic’, and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker’s ‘Anthropology’. Miles Davis’ trumpet soloing is very seductive.

The film is due to start shortly so I head from the record store back to Actor’s Studio cinema for ‘Nothing to Declare’, a light-hearted comedy set in the 1990s when the borders between many European countries were being opened up.

‘Nothing to Declare’ has a great opening scene. Benoît Poelvoorde as the francophobe Belgian customs officer Ruben Vandevoorde is shown a newspaper headline breaking the news that the customs post at which he works on the French/Belgian border is going to be closed as part of the European Union’s policy to reduce barriers to trade and travel within Europe.

Vandevoorde lets out a lung-bursting scream that goes on for several seconds.

He drops to his knees and vainly implores the heavens to say it isn’t so.

The camera pulls back faster and faster, with Vandevoorde becoming just a speck on the ground and then not even that as the screen fills with a map of Europe and then the earth spinning aimlessly in an indifferent universe.

Visually, this is a brilliantly effective way of putting the closure of the customs post into a much broader human and cosmic context.

The customs post earmarked for closure is located in a drab little border area, but the characters that people the place give it life and colour.

Benoît Poelvoorde and Dany Boon, the two lead actors, play off each other superbly.

Their initial mutual dislike evolves into a friendship of sorts that eventually just about overcomes the entrenched prejudiced mindset of the francophobe Belgian officer.

The rapport between Poelvoorde and Boon peaks during their interrogation of a hapless drug courier who tries to deny any knowledge of the packets of cocaine lodged in his own rectal cavity.

Boon and Poelvoorde’s characters take great delight in mocking the criminal’s feeble pleas of innocence, and their jokey repartee sparkles like they are a well-honed comedy duo.

The supporting cast generally don’t receive much characterization, functioning simply as comic props for the story.

One exception is Julie Bernard as the sister of Belgian officer Vandevoorde.

She falls in love with Dany Boon’s French officer, Mathias Ducatel. Julie Bernard gives a good performance as an open-minded individual who has the misfortune of being born into a xenophobic family.

Dany Boon is a great talent. Not only does he write and direct this film, he also does a great job acting alongside the equally good Benoît Poelvoorde.

Boon has a very expressive face and though he normally uses it to comic effect, he can also convincingly convey emotions of anger and frustration.

‘Nothing to Declare’ is a wonderful film, heartwarming without being cloying or naïve.

I laugh out loud several times during the film, as do the rest of the audience.

One particularly funny scene is the one where Dany Boon is down on one knee in a restaurant proposing to Julie Bernard when he realizes to his horror that everyone in the restaurant is watching him, so he quickly pretends that he is just tying his shoelace.

The comic potential of the crappy car that has been assigned to the joint Franco-Belgian police operation is fully realized.

Another funny scene that has the whole audience laughing is the one where Boon and Poelvoorde have parked their car at the side of a country road.

Both of them stick out their arms to signal to an oncoming driver that he should stop, but the driver assumes that they are just making a gesture of greeting so he returns the gesture and blissfully drives on, leaving Boon and Poelvoorde dumbstruck at the driver’s misunderstanding of their ‘stop’ command.

After watching ‘Nothing to Declare’, I quaff my final beer of the day, a Moinette Blond.

It’s a strong ale, 8.5% alcohol by volume, from Brasserie Dupont in the Walloon municipality of Leuze-en-Hainaut in the south of Belgium.

There is a satisfying pop as the cork comes out the bottle. The smell is almost smoky. It’s a delicious blond ale which goes down very nicely.

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