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BrinzaCiprian-1999
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After Hours (1985)
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens
Sure, is not a perfect movie from a tehnical standpoint, but doesn't try to be. Scorsese knew this story and the progression of it is about the ATMOSPHERE, and you can't get that specific atmosphere if everything is sterile. It got to be messy to evoke some emotions. Similar to Polanski's The Tenant, but After Hours has a familiarity to it that touches me more. I think the key to this picture is the pacing, the score, the rhythm, to quote Del "Rhythm, you have it or you don't" and Scorsese has it. ...what? The movie initially had 2h 22min and was trimmed down to 1h 37min cause the test audience didn't like it. Oh well, nobody wants to know how the hot dog is made, so let's judge the final product and not get lost ourselves in the details at the moment. Interesting stuff behind the scenes tho with Tim Burton to direct, Joe Frank plagiarized, Scorsese not being able to do The Last Temptation of Christ, etc. But let's talk about After Hours.
This movie is perfect the way it is, I can watch it with my brain shut and enjoy the big picture, a simple plot that lures you in his environment and won't let you go. The tone, music, the simplicity, every little thing that happens has a pay-off, every character is interesting with a life worth a movie to explore it, the fact that every conflict is caused by a misunderstanding. You know, like in REAL LIFE. There's not a good protagonist, evil antagonist, wise old man, so on and so forth. They're just people and that makes it much easier to empathize with them. I can consume it like a B movie without problems and enjoy it. But what makes this movie a film (the transition from just entertainment to something meaningful) is that you can go in the opposite direction and lose yourself in details, themes and interpretation. I mean the castration, fail to satisfy, reincarnation, fire and burns, the checkerboard themes, skull, religion, thunder, the circular journey, Scorsese in general costume, Kafka's The Trial dialogue, Paul disappearing from his desk in the final sequence, the man in the black coat from the last 2 sec of the film. But it's your choice to see it or ignore it, the film doesn't insist on anything, it let you choose his simplicity or intricacy.
I can go with the interpretation that he is in heaven and to cite David Byrne, nothing happens there, so he's bored, get out, starts playing a game of chess with Grim Reaper like in The Seventh Seal. We hear the cop from subway saying "there must be a full moon out there" which is a reference to American Werewolf in London in which Griffin Dunne plays a ghost stuck in limbo, a nod that he's playing the same role in After Hours. After he lose the game, he returns to heaven and enter the golden gates in white powder like a ghost and hears bells. And they say you hear bells after you die so that's the moment when Death comes after him to take his soul. Or you can go with the dream theory and the similarities between After Hours and Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland. That will explain the fire theme being his fear projected in the nightmare that he has. Or say he dream Tropic of Cancer, he doesn't reread it, and that will explain the many skulls that appears in the film, to take a passage from the book "In every metro station there are grinning skulls that greet you with 'defendez-vous centre la syphilis!' wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis." or maybe the skulls symbolized Baron Samedi.
I don't know but that's the beauty of it, you can ramble about it without being sure of anything.
The magic lies in mystery and After Hours preserve that mystery very well.