Prologue - Paul Hackett wants to get laid. Epilogue - Paul Hackett wants to go home. Paul Hackett wants to get a second of a sleep. Paul Hackett wants this night to end, forever. Paul Hackett wants to return to his boring work of word processing. Paul Hackett wants to live out this reality of nightmare. Griffin Dunne is Paul Hackett and his nightmare is laugh riot in a sick way in the Martin Scorcese’s “After Hours”.In the wake of evening, lights up a night for Paul. He visits a coffee shop and gets into a conversation with a bright and edgy woman (Rosanna Arquette). Not the spark but something to invite a call. He goes home and calls back immediately. The fantasy land of men works out the calculation to get laid in an hour with forty five minutes to travel and fifteen minutes to chat. The terror begins in a taxi cab ride swinging him like a roller coaster without a safety belt wherein he loses his last twenty dollars. Broke and left at the door step in a long and distant downtown of New York, Paul Hackett is stepping into the night of his life.
What a movie to watch and laugh every single frame of the trouble he goes through. How much twisted and a tone of dark comic does writer Joseph Minion has that he cracks down on this character like a psychological torture experiment over his enemy. Not gross, not creepy but just enough to walk the line to laugh on his stumbling pile of problems. In the wet streets of the city where the moon has disowned it by the crankiness airing out, Paul goes from one trouble after another with his curiosity and after a while his desperation for a place to say.
Everything is surreal. Extreme out of the reality coincidences but intertwines on the strangeness of a late night. The woman from the coffee shop is named Marcy and lives with her room mate Kiki Bridges (Linda Florentino) making sculptures out of old newspaper and plaster of paris. She teases him over for a massage when Marcy is out and when the time is about to tick in to make his move, she sleeps. Then comes Marcy and he gives the spooks for any one and wonder what made Paul to do such an impulsive action. He forces out only to be stuck in the place forever.
Have you gone through a day wherein there is no possibility for any right thing to happen at all? I am sure you would have or at least the anger and frustration in one pans in the other to cause a ripple effect. I went through in my trip. In an Island where winter is a bad season to be stuck in a mess, I got stuck in the Ocracoke Island. Missed the first ferry by two minutes and then fog loomed. Missing the second ferry and waiting for it, I steered in to the stupidness of driving over a beach. Got stuck in a fog filled beach with a car ready to pummel me if it had life, I was desolated for twenty minutes. Finally got help and came back to see the fog persisting not to let the ferry leave. I waited for three hours and it felt like I would never be let off this island. But I was having different kind of fun though. It is nothing like what Paul goes through but I could relate his struggle of been stuck in a place with a terrifying thought of no escape.
Michael Ballhus swings the camera from behind and brings in front while keeping the character in focus and then follow the corners of the desk in a congested office and shots down the key drop like a failed rocket on to the face and lifts it up. You are dizzied and enchanted by that and fall right into the theme of the film of topsy turvy land and space.
Apparently “After Hours” was a self motivating and much needed film for Scorcese since his first attempt on “The Last Temptation of Christ” got shut down. Depressed and desperate he landed on this script. This is an entertainer and the love for film is painted through out. Griffin Dunne as the guy in a mess gets invitation from all the women he meets only to be terrified in to further weirdness. He goes to a bar and the waitress (Teri Garr) leaves him a funny note and invites him to her apartment where her bed is surrounded by mouse traps. Another woman (Catherine O’Hare) who gets off a taxi accidentally hurts him and again, invites him for helping but in the meanwhile doing everything possible to forget a number he got from directory service. And she has a license to drive the Ice Cream truck. Finally is an old lady June (Verna Bloom) sitting in the corner of a surreal German Disco Club minding her business and she becomes Paul’s only hope for surviving the night. But no, she wraps him up as a sculpture in order him to go unnoticed by the vigilante gang mistaking him for a burglar. June leaves him out there stuck in it. This is one of his few mishaps in a night of bumps, beat and lots of running.
“After Hours” is the funniest and truly artistic film I have seen recently. It takes this character and spins him around like a dancing toy keyed on. Then they key him on and put near clearly defined paranoid circumstances. One instinct after another he seeks out and with enough beat knows that anything after this would only lead further mayhem. “Final” Epilogue - Paul Hackett wants the morning, if it comes.
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