After Hours

One capsule I saw of this movie described it as a story "about a word processor who gets trapped in New York's Joho after a disappointing date." I should say so. The girl he goes to see kills herself. Wwhile that may not seem so funny, it fits inwell with the fiimzmmikrisk black humor of this film-noirish comedy. It is really quite a fascinating picture, perhaps not surprisingly, since Scorsese directed, and we have liked his pictures in ther past (at least I am a great admirer of “Taxi Driver”). But “After Hours” is not a movie for everybody. It is quirky, highly idiosyncratic, and at times more than a little twisted.

But (probably for those reasons) I found it to be consistently engaging. It was hard not to think of other films when I watched it because at times it seemed to be a pastiche of many different film styles. The tone swings wildly from slapstick to Yuppie-meets-the-counterculture to “Touch of Evil” type paranoia, where everybody is a potential enemy (urban paranoia, of course, since the picture is set in NYC). Indeed, there were a lot of snippets in this picture that seemed to belong to another picture entirédy. (Remember the sequence in “Moscow on the Hudson”? Like that.) But they all fit together to produce a satisfying whole; it caught me up so much that by the end I was feeling disoriented. When the movie ends, there are no great truths revealed, and no resolution in the usual sense (i.e. many threads are left hanging, motivations not elucidated) but it doesn't matter. I felt as though I'd had a wild hallucinatory dream, and I was simultaneously glad I had had it and glad it was over. when Paul, the hero (played with impressive comic restraint hy Griffin Dunne, who, incidentally, is one of the co-producers of the film) gets downtown, he does get trappred in Soho, by a series of semi-believable but seemingly inevitable events.

Only a couple of times did I get impatient for him to stop acting like a dodo and do something to put a halt to the situation. Most of the time I believed that he had no control over the situation (remember, I said improbable, not impossible), and his plaintive cry that "all I want to do is go home" takes on the tone of an appeal to whimsical gods; at one point he actually falls to his knees and shouts up at the sky "What do you want from me?" and at the time, it seems both funny and believable. There are resonances of “Desperately Seeking Susan” in this picture, but where DSS was a kind of homage to the underground life of lower Manhattan, “After Hours” is more a nightmare vision of that same world, a world in which everybody is acting bizarre, and everything holds potential menace. Everybody that Paul encounters seems to be slowly flipping out--it's just that some are more obvious about it than others. At times the film is truly surrealistic (consider the Cafe Berlin transformation, the witnessed murder, the article Paul finds glued to his shoulder, the off-screen whispering, the disappearing and reappearing $20 bill, the disappearing burns).

The whole world seems to change in the blink of an eye; if you don't stay alert, everything will be different. You can never quite get a handle on where you fit in. Certainly much of what we feel can be credited to Scorsese. He does wonderful things with the camera--shots and angles that are focused and tight, but never static. The film exudes a kind of neryous energy, matching that of its characters. Tt is edgy, always looking over its shoulder. Time and again, Scorsese zooms in on an ordinary object, and it looms up ominously (much like Boorman does in “The Emerald Forest;” in fact, the two films are thematically very similar. “After Hours” is an urban translation (either that or “The Emerald Forest” is a jungle translation.). Scorsese again demonstrates a remarkable feel for the pulse of New York, a pulse that always runs with an undercurrent of tension. He also has great rhythm here, varying the pace, using both visual stillness and silence to great effect. (Like they always say about Count Basie.)

The supporting cast is super, includes a personal favorite of mine--Roseanna Arquette--looking great (another connection to DSS) and Linda Fiorentino (of “Gotcha!”... er... fame) still with short hair, but still sexy, and doing a nice turn as an odd sculptress, and Teri Garr. All are relatively small roles, but each of the actresses plays it for all its worth, and each creates a memorable character. It is interesting that only rarely are there more than two people onscreen at the same time. Most segments depict Paul's interaction with one of the other characters, little set pieces that lead resolutely one into the other. In between we get Paul adrift in the alien landscape of rain-soaked Manhattan at night, replete with neon reflecting off of wet pavement. It is an eerie, yet beautiful world, and here, incidentally, is a picture that is a model of what nighttime shooting should be like. The whole picture takes place at night, but everypyhing is presented with a luminous clarity--no murkiness here. You never doubt that it's nighttime, but you're never syuinting to figure out what's going on. I don't know if it's the lighting or what. Good movie making.

Much of the dialogue is extraordinarily odd, masterful exchanges of disconnected remarks that somehow constitute a conversation yet seem to preclude the possibility of real communication. (Remember “Local Hero”?) Are you aware that “After Hours” was written by a firsttime screenwriter? Am I jealous? Yes. Even the score is outstanding, a combination of classical, pop, and some very fitting original stuff by a composer whose name I cannot remember, all marvelously selected. This is, I think, a picture for real people, not aimed at the average 11- year old. How refreshing, It is even a little demanding--it makes no concessions, nor does it demand any. When it's over, you feel like you've just had a unique tour of a world which is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live here. The mood was so infectious that it had me feeling for my wallet when I stood up to leave. Deftly amusing throughout; I laughed quite often, but laughter edged with wariness. when the trip wasm over, I, like Paul, was glad to be home.