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In the Flesh: After Hours
🕑 Added 2021-06-09 16:19:41 +0000 UTCAn unpaid cabbie, a jilted date, a hamburger ordered and abandoned; Scorsese’s After Hours is a veritable spider web of minor social obligations in which hapless everyman Paul (Griffin Dunne) becomes ever more inescapably entangled, tripped up over and over again by his own prior attempts to extricate himself from awkward and unpleasant situations. The woman whose apartment he slips out of kills herself that same night. The cabbie he stiffs later robs him and drives off with a shout of, “See how you like it!” Paul’s world is a closed moral loop, a place where “what goes around comes around, usually at a higher velocity” is less a dad joke than a statement of metaphysical fact. It’s a world where molehills really are mountains.
Appropriately then, Scorsese shoots New York with a combination of seen-it-all ease and breathless wonder. The everyday becomes sublime; empty nighttime streets yawning like murky canyons, streetlights casting watery pools of pale illumination, stairwells stretching dark and depthless. The camera moves with urgency when Paul lunges for a telephone, trudges after him through driving rain, and races like a zephyr ahead of his speeding taxi. Even in relatively quiet moments it remains lively, dancing around facial tics and other small, unconscious motions. When Paul is on the telephone looking for a place to crash after losing his keys, Scorsese glides over the landscape of his face, bringing us fully into the intensity of his agitated need. No subject or moment is too small to merit close attention.
And the people! Rosanna Arquette is fantastically self-absorbed as the damaged, over-sharing Marcy, a figure at once infuriating and deeply sympathetic, sharing her trauma like it’s no big deal in hopes that someone will share its brutal weight with her, just for a minute. When Paul mirrors her behavior near the end of the film, babbling about his awful night in the city (to a much more sympathetic audience than he was to Marcy) in the hopes that someone will take pity on him, will give him a place to let down his guard and rest, it’s a moment of heartbreaking unselfawareness, a reminder that no one is more than one bad day away from living out the reality of people regularly deemed “intolerable.” After Hours is wild, woolly, and blackly hilarious.
