Less Gorgeous, Equally Mystifying

I've been spending a lot of time on public transportation in Istanbul, which I suppose is why I found this quote so striking: 

His gaze takes in the other passengers: “the drooping mustaches, the face of a weary, elderly woman, a pair of youthfully mischievous eyes belonging to a girl,” before happily settling on his footwear. “I must say,” he confesses to his reader, “I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead.”

The quote comes from Emily Stoke's review of Wim Wender's dance movie Pina, and she closes with several lovely lines:

By filming Bausch’s dancers in different sites across the city—an industrial strip, the park outside a museum—Wenders locates his dancers firmly in reality, which is both less gorgeous than the dancers are and equally mystifying. Cars drive past at high speed, waving their football flags. People hurry by, ignoring the silk-clad dancers while their dogs bark at them. If you’re not looking hard enough, the camera reminds us, you could easily miss it; dancers could be anywhere, even if just sitting in a back seat, looking straight ahead.

Something in the way she talks about reality, as something both "less gorgeous" and "equally mystifying" as these dancers. Maybe it speaks to Istanbul in the grips of yet another flurry of snow, a snow my friend once described as almost wanting to dance rather than fall.