CINEMA: Jonathan Romney
NOVELIST Paul Auster has described Blue in the Face as a “hymn to the great People’s Republic of Brooklyn”. Judging by the film, such a hymn would sound like a full brass band with Latino rappers and boozy singalong accompaniment, belting out an off- key version of Take Me Out to the Ballgame.
Blue in the Face is a companion piece to the recently released Smoke, the beautifully leisurely Brooklyn melodrama that Auster scripted for director Wayne Wang. In everything but location, it’s a million miles away from Smoke’s wordly-wise melancholy. The mood is anarchic, at times downright farcical, and it’s some achievement that Wang and Auster have managed to make two films so different in tone, yet close in spirit.
Once again, everything rotates around the Brooklyn cigar store run by Harvey Keitel’s wry street-corner philosopher Auggie Wren. But where Smoke threaded a winding narrative around the connected fates of several characters, Blue in the Face uses the shop as the venue for a knockabout succession of turns, routines and interruptions. It’s the nearest thing cinema has produced to a comedy club open-mike spot.
Auster and Wang enjoyed making Smoke so much that they decided to make a different film at the same time, and shot Blue in the Face over two three-day bursts. They made it an all-comers challenge, and called up famous names for improvising bouts, using Auster’s notes as a springboard.
Its array of walk-on star cameos sounds like an all- time turn-off, but the gamble pays off handsomely, partly because the invite list is so improbable. Lou Reed, a haggard Jurassic vision wreathed in cigar fumes, drones on wryly about Brooklyn’s glory days, and proves to be perfect chat-show material. Roseanne Barr, blasting away like an amorous foghorn, is pretty much Roseanne; Jim Jarmusch comes on like the patron saint of cigarettes, with his shock of hair the colour of cigarette ash; and Madonna’s bit part as a singing telegram proves her most convincing screen turn yet. There’s one brilliant cameo by a demented survey-taker in a scraggy beard and slacker shorts: believe it or not, Michael J Fox’s rehabilitation starts here.
Among the new names that stand out are Malik Yoba, as a rapping con artist with multiple identities, and Mel Gorham, as Auggie’s explosive Latino girlfriend. This being a thoroughly democratic venture, the local citizens get their say too, either walking on to spout statistics, or filmed in vox-pop video sequences by Harvey Wang, no relation. The icing on the cake is a terrific soundtrack of songs collaged together by David Byrne.
At first sight, Blue in the Face may look like offhand whimsy. But the humanist spirit that ran through Smoke also holds this film together. The Brooklynite’s nostalgia that informs much of Auster’s writing is here again, most poignantly in a requiem for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In a beautifully understated scene, Auggie’s boss (Victor Argo) is visited by the phantom of baseball legend Jackie Robinson; it packs all the sports-nerd sentiment of Field of Dreams into a neat, poetic two minutes.
It’s clearly a source of wonder to the film-makers that the Brooklyn community managed to survive a cataclysm like the demolition of the Dodgers stadium. Their point is that Brooklyn can still be a haven of diversity as long as there are places like Auggie’s store, less a hangout for slackers and clowns than a sort of all-day Socratic symposium on the good life.