After Hours (1985)

I can't say that I'm Martin Scorsese's biggest admirer but After hours is undoubtedly one of his better movies. It is an almost completely nonsensical story but what works is the depiction of a night that starts out as a promise of an adventure and that ends as a frenzy nightmare. The protagonist roams around in a nocturnal New York and one bad thing after another happens to him. With all these coincidence, a Paul Auster-world could have been conjured up, but coincidence in this film is not elusive, nor is it beautiful: it is just hellish. This is 100 % atmosphere and sleazy locations. New York is the urban hell but the strange characters it inhabits - a crazy taxi driver, a psychotic (?) girl, a sculptor or two, a waitress who hates her job... - are chronicled with both charm and tenderness. The main character is the bored and boring office-rat who thinks he is about to take the subway train downtown to spend a nice and exciting night in the company of a new acquiantance. This is not exactly how it turns out. The cinematographer is said to have worked with Fassbinder and it is as if the spirit of that German director looms over these images: dark and seedy, yet evocative. What is perhaps the major merit of After hours is that it is so hard to explain what the hell it is supposed to be. Some of it is funny, most of it is dark and the progression of it all seems to have the character of a lunatic thriller. The film could be said to be rooted in the classic Noir-tradition: the innocent guy is involved in all kinds of plots and ends up framed for a crime. Innocence no more! When watching it, I appreciated the sense of danger and desperation: the nonsense nonewithstanding, some layers of this feeling felt real. After hours is a brave film because it dodges the familiar film structure and it does very little to invite us into a familiar universe of intelligible goals and intensions. It takes us on a ride in the darkness, and does it surprisingly well.