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Smoke

© Andrej Ristic

A girl that was amazed by my love for the ritual of smoking, suggested to me that I watch this film. She and I and the characters within that film understood that the whole idea behind the actual process of smoking is the enjoyment of relaxation, of movements--It has nothing to do with an actual physical addiction. It is a moment of the peace that overcomes the body, a moment of perfect joy that enters through your mouth, scratches the throat just the right way as it goes past it and satisfies every nerve of your body. Then, you gently blow the excess smoke out and reposition your fingers touching the cigarette in a motion as natural as swallowing the food, so that you can shake the excess ashes and leave the cigarette to take a sip of coffee.

The story of the film is centered around the Brooklyn Cigar Company at the corner of Third Street and Eight Avenue--A center of the world of the characters of the film. Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel), who works in the store, takes a photograph of it every day before work. As he shows it to his friend, writer Paul (William Hurt), he comments: "That's my project. What you'd call my life's work."

Paul's life has been determined by the fact that his wife, Ellen, has found herself accidentally in the path of a bullet after buying him cigarettes. Auggie laments that if only she didn't give him the exact change at that moment, she might have stayed for another moment in the shop, thus avoiding the terrible fate. His life gets changed again when a black boy from the Projects, who calls himself Rashid (Harold Perrineau Jr.), pushes him out of the way of a truck, saving his life. The boy has just escaped the drug dealers from his neighborhood with a substantial sum of their money.

Later Auggie's girlfriend from long ago (Stockard Channing) appears with the news that Felicity (Ashley Judd), her daughter, possibly his as well, is pregnant. Rashid, whose life story we are slowly learning, turns out to be a boy looking for his father (Forest Whitaker).

Smoke is a film about the turnouts of life, about taking pleasure in small things, about importance of the rituals, one of them being the smoking ritual and the familiarity, about Brooklyn and an attempt to tell at least several of its stories. There is such a sweetness and kindness in the way the writer Paul Auster unravels the story. Film ends after the end of the main stories with a conversation between Auggie and Paul in which Auggie tells him one of the kindest stories of life. With the idea of Blue in the Face that came afterwards, it is safe to assume that the makers of it just were having too much fun working on it.

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