After Hours, written by Joseph Minion, directed by Martin Scorsese

After Hours, written by Joseph Minion, directed by Martin Scorsese

The brilliant Martin Scorsese has proved that he creates masterpieces from 1973 and ever since the list has grown longer:

Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz, Raging Bull, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence

The genius is famous worldwide for his dramas, crime motion pictures and yet he has demonstrated that he can create some of the best comedies ever that audiences can enjoy.

King of Comedy is an absolute chef d’oeuvre, there are splendid, archetypal, quintessential comedy moments even in the darkest Scorsese features – “Are you talking to me?”- from Taxi Driver to Casino and Mean Streets to Goodfellas:

“I'm funny how, I mean funny like I'm a clown?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E84VqqCPI7w

The remarkable Griffin Dunne is excellent in the title role of Paul Hackett, who has an astonishing, cruel, tiresome, eventful and absurd After Hours, one night, after he meets Marcy aka the splendid Rosanna Arquette in a bar, they start talking about books and she mentions…paper weights- it gets into outré territory very quickly- made by her friend.

Paul Hackett is supposedly interested in these paperweights, with a peculiar shape, and he calls the phone number he has and talks to Marcy, who invites him over to the place where she lives and that she shares with her sculptor friend, Kiki aka Linda Fiorentino.

As the hero takes a cab, he has a twenty dollar bill, which is all he has, in the compartment in front of him, but as the driver is speeding like he is performing in…Speed or the Fast and the Furious 4 or maybe 7, the bill flies out the window, to the desperation of the passenger who tries to get the attention of the crazy man behind the wheel without success.

He cannot pay, climbs to the apartment, where the artist is at work and the sculpture is indeed noteworthy, the guest comments that it looks like a three dimensional version of the famous painting, only he mistakes the title, which is The Scream by Edvard Munch.

The protagonist is invited to…work at this version of The Scream, by attaching paper to the art form, then he is massaging Kiki, the woman falls asleep and as the visitor is walking out of the huge apartment, Marcia returns with her bizarre tales about a man that used to be her husband and when they had sex- for the first and only time- had the rather perverse pleasure to cry “take it Dorothy”, for he was obsessed with the Wizard of Oz.

Paul is overwhelmed by this development and perhaps the attitude of the woman, who seems to be forthcoming and at the same time rather strange in her mannerisms and he tries to escape in the easy way, which is to look for the way out the door.

Nevertheless, he is not going to find an easy way out of his quagmire, if at all, because from here on, if not from the very start, the protagonist will be trapped inside an intricate labyrinth and once he is out of the artistic flat, he tries to get the subway, for he only has a little less than a dollar in his pocket and it is late in the night, only to find that the fare has just went up at midnight and he does not have enough…by about three cents.

He cannot get home and it is raining hard, so he takes refuge in a bar and the owner offers some help, in the manner of a small loan, after which the hero can help by getting from the place of the bar tender the keys he needs for his cash register, however, he is suspected of robbery and will eventually be attacked and chased by a mob of vigilantes.

As he walks these streets pushed by absurd events, the protagonist observes that what looks like two robbers have stolen the Kiki statue and they try to embark it in their van, dropping it after the intervention of the hero, who takes it back to the rightful owner, who is tied up in…a game of BDSM and says that she sold the statue and her TV set.

As he tries to apologize to Marcy for his tempestuous exit, Paul gets to her bedroom, only to find her lifeless on the bed, with an empty bottle of pills next to her pillow, explaining her apparent suicide; the hero tries to call an ambulance, after hoping for help from Kiki and her kinky lover, but they have gone to this bar where the survivor is invited with the now late Marcy.

This is getting ever more complex and absurd, even if there are no Rhinoceros from the play by Eugen Ionesco roaming the streets, for when the protagonist returns to the bar, the owner is no longer there and there is another complication when one of the waitresses working at the bar takes the hero to her home and she wants to become intimate with him…

The bar tender is actually the owner of the flat with the sculptures and the lover of late Marcy, whose death is devastating him and adds more complications to an already convoluted story line, which works fantastically under the guidance of the genius director, Martin Scorsese.

It is evident that under the supervision of perhaps any other film maker, After Hours would have gone off the rails and it would have given a feeling of losing the thread of the plot, but as it is, the comedy works perfectly and it is radiant, amusing, outré and rewarding.

Here is just a glimpse of the excellent humor in this exceptional comedy:

“Pepe: I never watch Carson.

Neil: Yeah? Well, that's how much you know about art.”