CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale
HARVEY KEITEL gets to smile warmly in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s Smoke, and that’s only one reason to see this deceptively emotional, Zen-like drama about family, identity and
Keitel plays Auggie, a cigar-store manager in Brooklyn who has photographed his shop at the same time every day for 14 years. William Hurt is novelist Paul Benjamin, a regular customer, who is suffering writer’s block after the random and violent death of his wife.
Harold Perrinau is the black teenager caught up in danger who changes his identity for everyone he meets. Forest Whitaker is Cyrus Cole, a man who runs away from his past and tries to set up a new life after accidentally killing his wife. And the wonderful Stockard Channing is Ruby, Keitel’s teenage sweetheart who returns after many years to tell him they have a daughter who is addicted to crack.
These multifarious characters all touch each other’s lives during the course of the movie, and in the cyclical nature of its action each character contributes to another’s personal
Wang first leapt into the limelight with his low-budget, self-financed, tongue-in-cheek thriller, Chan is Missing. Before succeeding with the high-budget The Joy-Luck Club he directed Life is Cheap … But Toilet Paper is Expensive, an amazing, anarchic semi- documentary about Hong Kong. Auster is the author of several novels including The Music of Chance, which was turned into an accomplished film starring James Spader two years ago.
Together they have created a relaxed yet quirky film which tackles highly charged topics like drug-dealing, dispossession, family, love, friendship, fate, and above all stories and words and how people relate to each other.
There’s a lot of dialogue in this film, and most of it is shot in wide master shots, much like a theatre piece. As the story develops and the characters become closer to each other, so Wang starts to cut and move his camera, ending on a magnificent four-minute track into Keitel’s mouth as he relates a Christmas anecdote that provides the film’s stunning close.
Featuring a marvellous ensemble cast and a deceptively simple style, it’s no surprise that Wang and his cast and crew decided to make another film in three days immediately after Smoke. Called Blue in the Face, it was improvised by the Smoke cast and a bunch of eager others including Roseanne Barr, Lily Tomlin, Lou Reed and Jim Jarmusch. Now why, one asks, is Ster-Kinekor not playing it as a companion piece?