Griffin Dunne meets punk sculptress Linda Fiorentino while looking forward to a date with her roommate.
AFTER HOURS
1985, Warner Home Video, DD-2.0/MA/16:9/LB/ST/CC/+, $19.97, 97m 1s, DVD-1 By Tim Lucas
Set in that transient moment
of recent history when offices were changing over from IBM Selectric typewriters to Wang and Compaq computers, AFTER HOURS is a sustained and styl- ized romp through ratcheting contemporary anxieties—urban, social and romantic. It’s an ex- tended nightmare for its word processor protagonist, played by Griffin Dunne, but for director Martin Scorsese, it was a liber- ating return to his roots of com- pact , mobile, independent filmmaking. The project was un- dertaken on the spur of the mo- ment when funding was abruptly withdrawn from Scorsese’s long- planned THE LAST TEMPTATION
This papier-maché sculpture by Nora Chavooshian plays an important role in Martin Scorsese’s AFTER HOURS.
OF CHRIST (eventually made in 1988), a creative shock that forced him to reassess his future in the increasingly bloated busi- ness of making motion pictures. With this modestly budgeted ($4.5 million), swiftly completed (40 day) production, Scorsese stepped back from his inclination toward more serious subjects of scope to make a darkly comic character study, and—his asso- ciates say—rediscovered his love of movie-making in the process. It was his first of a (to date) half- dozen collaborations with former Fassbinder DP Michael Ballhaus and, remarkably, it looks at least on par, production value-wise, with his previous $20,000,000 production THE KING OF COM- EDY (1983), and has dated con- spicuously better. Late night TV has seen better days, but urban and romantic anxiety are here to stay.
Based on a college thesis
screenplay titled LIES by Joseph Minion (VAMPIRE’S KISS), and filmed as A NIGHT IN SOHO, AFTER HOURS traces a night
in the dull life of office worker Paul Hackett (Dunne), whose hopes of sexual conquest are aroused by a chance meeting with quirky Sohoite Marcy (Rosanna Arquette). Playing along with her mood swings to gain closeness, Paul scores an invitation to the loft she shares with sculptress friend Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), loses his last $20 out the taxi window while going there, and finds himself stranded in Soho, amid all stripes of crazies who come to suspect him of being the burglar terrorizing their neighborhood. In the space of six hours, Paul finds himself involved not only in burglary, but in a suicide, theft, some very big lies, and secondary dates with partners in whom he has no interest (a deglamorized Teri Garr, the underrated Rob- ert Plunket), until an entire neighborhood is pursuing him through the streets like angry villagers in an old Frankenstein film. His fundamental wish to return to his home echoes the dilemma of Dorothy Gale, a fact
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