After Hours

 After Hours is a reminder of Martin Scorsese's brilliance at the prime of his career.  The 1985 black comedy was made at a point when Scorsese's star was in decline -- his The King of Comedy, in fact a masterpiece, had been roundly panned and had lost money; even worse, his pet project, The Last Temptation of Christ on which he had worked for more than a year with every expectation of the film being greenlighted was suddenly cast into limbo.  At this nadir in his career, Scorsese returned to New York, rented a loft in Tribeca, and, with After Hours, reinvented himself as a lean, mean, and thrifty guerilla filmmaker.  The picture was shot entirely at night -- even the inside scenes were shot in the Soho area of lower Manhattan after dark.  The film is extraordinary, memorable from its first shot to last image.  Scorsese's directing is impeccable -- he squeezes every sequence for maximum expressivity but doesn't overwhelm the viewer with his magisterial technique. The camera effects, the whip pans and fast tracking motions, the jarring close-ups and German expressionist lighting -- all of these bravura techniques are intrinsic to the narration and, in fact, are embedded in a film that a features a number of long takes that are conventionally shot but, also, characterized by breathtaking razor sharp dialogue.  The film is as expressive as a music video but doesn't give the effect of being overwrought or frenetic -- the action has a hysterical edge, the entire picture is surreal nightmare of anxiety, but, paradoxically, one has the sense of a serene, classically composed intelligence directing the action. (This is embodied in a shot of Scorsese in punk rock bar directing a spotlight at people writhing on the dance floor.)

Griffin Dunne with Amy Robinson discovered an extraordinary script written by Joseph Minion.  They pitched the script as a low budget production to Tim Burton.  Scorsese had read the script and admired it but was busy working on the aborted Last Temptation of Christ.  When the production of that film was cancelled, Scorsese storyboarded the script (it didn't have a convincing ending) and began shooting the picture with a cast that included Rosanne Arquette, Catherine O'Hara, Terry Garr, and Verna Bloom as the various crazy women that Dunne playing the role of Paul Hackett encounters during his nightmare sojourn in Soho.  Hackett is a computer nerd working at an uptown business behind a huge gilded gate in an elaborate skyscraper facade.  While reading a dog-eared copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, he meets a seductive girl, clad all in white, who quotes parts of Miller's prose back to him.  He gets the girl's phone number and, a few hours later, calls her back.  She invites him to apartment in Soho, actually located in one of the circles of Dante's Inferno.  During a frightening cab ride to Soho, Hackett loses his money for the night -- a twenty dollar bill that keeps showing up as his hellish adventures progress.  (The film is an artifact of its era -- there are no cell-phones and, surprisingly, Hackett has no credit cards -- these are dream-like aspects of the plot which will involve Hackett's increasingly terrifying and desperate misadventures; critics were wrong to deride the film's logic -- the picture has the uncanny and utterly persuasive logic of a nightmare.)  Hackett has some neuroses -- he had a bad experience as a child once when he was put in a burn unit (after appendix surgery) and he is hapless with respect to dealing with women; he responds to emergencies by running away.  It turns out that Roseanna Arquette's character, Marcy, has suffered some kind of burns and her behavior is eccentric and puzzling -- she transmits mixed messages.  (She dramatically tells Paul that she was raped by her ex-boyfriend while tied to a bed for six hours, but, then, notes that the whole thing was rather boring and that she slept through much of it.)   Paul smokes some dope with her and becomes paranoid, fleeing the loft apartment that she shares with a roommate apparently involved in BDSM.  (Paul compliments the roommate on her body and she says:  "Yeah, good body."  Not too many scars.)  Things go from bad to worse -- there's a suicide likely caused by the hero's "rudeness" as one character puts it, Paul gets assaulted in a punk bar, Berlin, where the staff tries to shave his head -- "Mohawk him!" they scream -- and, ultimately, is hunted by a murderous mob of vigilantes who think he has been robbing their apartments.  (In fact, the apartments are being systematically looted by Cheech and Chong.)  The film has always been controversial for its portrayal of the women that Paul encounters:  these women are half-crazed, desperate, eerily seductive and threatening -- they are like the women that we find in Kafka's Trial and The Castle:  uncanny figures who cling to the hero as if he were their last hope in a world of cruel loneliness.  (In one scene, the characters reprise dialogue from Kafka's parable "Before the Law").  The film has the savage and headlong narrative of a farce, but, instead of lust driving the action, the machinery of the intricate plot is driven by despair, suicide, and pathological neediness of the women that Paul encounters -- all of them are willing to debase themselves for a man's attention, hence the sadomasochistic components of the story and all of them expect to be abandoned, rejected, and humiliated.  Teri Garr plays a perky blonde embalmed in sixties' Carnaby-street style and mores -- she rewards Paul for returning to his apartment by giving him an artwork, a plaster-cast bagel, (Paul's quest for this sort of art is what drew him to Soho in the first place.).  Catherine O'Hara is an ice-cream truck driver, similarly perky but, also, as it turns out, homicidal.  And Verna Bloom is memorable as Paul's last resort, a sheltering maternal figure who happens to be a kind of vampire and completely psychotic.  The film begins and ends with Mozart and Scorsese's camera accelerating like a race car around the corners and edges of an office full of computers and workers -- despite its grotesque content, the movie has the clear contours of a classical sonata.