Just in time for Christmas, Yebisu Garden Cinema is reviving a film that was one of the cinema¡¯s biggest hits in the 1990s, director Wayne Wang¡¯s ¡°Smoke,¡± in a crisp new digital remastered version. Watching it again after all these years, it¡¯s hard not to feel a little pang, for in many ways it recalls days gone by.
Based on a short fiction piece by Paul Auster that appeared in The New York Times (¡°Auggie Wren¡¯s Christmas Story¡°), 1995¡¯s ¡°Smoke¡± was very much a collaboration between the novelist and Wang, the Hong Kong-born, San Francisco-based indie filmmaker who had graduated from no-budget indies such as ¡°Chan Is Missing¡± (1982) to outright commercial success with ¡°The Joy Luck Club¡± (1993).
Auster set his screenplay in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, where he had lived since the ¡®60s, and tried to sketch the bonds of community that emerge from the essential isolation of urban life, using a handful of characters centered around an old cigar shop. Auster didn¡¯t know it, but this would wind up being an epitaph to his old ¡®hood, the rough-edged, ethnic Brooklyn where you could still smoke indoors and drive-by shootings were, like, ¡°a thing.¡± Over the next decade the area morphed into hipster central, the gentrified playground of warehouse raves and artisinal cupcakes reflected in HBO¡¯s ¡°Girls.¡±
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