BRYAN CRANSTON smoking a cigar with a vacuum cleaner

Walter White, a New Mexico chemistry teacher, is diagnosed with Stage III cancer and given a prognosis of only two years left to live. He becomes filled with a sense of fearlessness and an unrelenting desire to secure his family's financial future at any cost as he enters the dangerous world of drugs and crime.

In the wake of his dramatic escape from captivity, Jesse Pinkman must come to terms with his past in order to forge some kind of future.

The opening scene in Cigar invites us into an air-conditioned office somewhere in the world. With all the delicate and smooth gestures of a connoisseur, a middle-aged man in a suit takes an expensive cigar out of a long, silver holder in a black leather case. Using the small guillotine of a cigar cutter, he carefully prepares it to be enjoyed. He gives it to his visitor and helps him light it. Their hands touch each other gently, the cigar is lit. With a nearly obscene concentrated enjoyment, the visitor smokes away in a sofa while the other man looks at him intensely. Despite the fact that the men in Annika Larsson’s works in many ways are caricatures of the typical Western male as a symbol of power, it would be wrong to say that she examines or critiques male power. It is more the peculiar erotic tension in apparently banal tasks that is important here.