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Rating:
The reason that prompted me to watch this film was that I once walked into a tobacco store-bar. Well, there was this giant poster of a scene from the film Smoke with Harvey Keitel prominently featured. I asked the clerk why such a beautiful quote, and he shrugged, saying it was an idea of the old owner. Now, behind that poster wasn't just mere advertising; whoever decided to fill an entire wall with that image did so out of love for the film itself. So I had no choice but to get my hands on this film. I had already heard about it, but the film turned out to be truly wonderful for many reasons. At the center of the story, we have Auggie (Harvey Keitel) and his tobacco shop in the heart of Brooklyn and the writer Paul Benjamin (William Hurt) who always buys his two cigars. The writer is in crisis for having lost his pregnant wife but meets Thomas, a young runaway black boy who he will take in, giving him back the desire to write and continue living. Meanwhile, Auggie discovers he has a supposed daughter from a former lover and tries to get her out of drugs, and Thomas finds his father who ran away after an accident where his wife died. Stories intertwine between human miseries and lives on the edge where friendship and dialogue, stories and interesting anecdotes prevail. Auggie is a simple tobacconist whose only hobby is photographing the corner of his tobacco shop every morning at eight o'clock sharp, and in one of these photos, Paul will recognize his wife. But Auggie's simplicity is made of stories of lived life, like the tender Christmas tale of the old blind lady he visits, playing along as her grandson to give her a serene Christmas. And Auggie's simplicity and Thomas's family reunion are, for Paul, the reason to continue living. One of the few films, in my opinion, where the skill of the writer (Paul Auster) finds full expression in the images and the interpretation of the protagonists, Harvey Keitel above all. The "magical" black and white of Auggie's photos becomes poetry even in the habits of gestures, rituals, and everyday situations. The close-ups of the faces and the pauses in dialogues between Auggie and Paul are rich with an authentic humanity where "smoking" is seen as a moment of reflection and moods. And those silences and pauses in dialogues are so unusual that the film seems like one of the few survivors of a cinema where feeling matters before action, even if the film has no symbolic pretensions but a strong, clear, suggestive representation of life and its simplest values.
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