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."