But the movie is still a delight, a fascinatingly strange and chaotic ballet set to familiar noir motifs.
And the primary vehicle for this excursion is that most profoundly familiar yet persistently engaging motif, the human face.
Some of the others reprise familiar motifs.
It was fine, sheer cambric, delicately embroidered all over with white silk thread in a familiar motif.
In a familiar mythic motif, Aeëtes promised to give him the fleece, but only if he could perform certain tasks.
They are mostly based on the theme of big waves, a familiar motif in Japanese prints.
The horse is a familiar motif in John Hawkes's fiction.
Dragons are a familiar motif in Japanese art and architecture, literature, and popular culture.
It was also a familiar motif in emblem books and tombs.
The rugs were clearly an occasion to think big, sometimes by merely scaling up the familiar motifs of traditional samplers.