After Hours

After Hours (1985) is about a man who cannot get home across a single night in New York. Paul is an ordinary data entry clerk. He meets a woman in a café and goes down to SoHo late at night. His only twenty dollar note blows out of the taxi. The subway fare goes up at midnight. He tries to walk back, and from then on the city will not release him: everyone he meets puts him into another situation, a wave of burglaries is pinned on him, and he is chased through the streets by people intending to lynch him. The structure runs on nightmare logic. No single event is impossible, but stacked together they become unreal. Scorsese made this out of necessity. The Last Temptation of Christ had been cancelled by the studio weeks before shooting. With no large budget left he turned to something small, shot at night, in a few streets. Almost all of it was filmed after dark on a very low budget. It won best director at Cannes. The camera is permanently uneasy: sudden pans, close ups of locks, the sound of doors shutting. Rosanna Arquette, Griffin Dunne, Teri Garr and Cheech and Chong are in it. The last scene shuts the whole night inside one apartment. It runs 97 minutes. Good for: black comedy, Scorsese, and nightmare logic. Less good for: the unease never lets up and not one character is any comfort.