Smoke

Smoke is a blithely intriguing film, and not merely because of its creators: director Wayne Wang, writer Paul Auster and actor Harvey Keitel. The film takes its starting point as Auster's own struggle to overcome a severe case of writers' block and his "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story" which ended it. But this is merely a launching pad for a series of interlinking stories of happy and unhappy coincidences set in Brooklyn. For the last 14 years Auggie (Keitel) has taken a photograph from in front of his cigar store at the same hour every day, while spending the rest of his hours socialising with his regular customers. Here, smoke is a metaphor for talking which obscures our understanding of each other, and the photographs a metaphor for storytelling. When Auggie tells writer Paul Benjamin (William Hurt) flicking through his photo project to slow down and see that each picture tells a story, we too are warned to slow down and see that each of these characters has something to say. While markers of the film may be miniscule - a ruined shipment of illegal Cuban cigars, a black teenager on the run, a crumpled paper bag containing $5000 in cash - they all delineate small gestures of human contact brought magically to life by Auster and Wang.

Reviewed by Monika Maurer