After Hours (1985)

With everyone gushing over Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, and since my curiosity (morbid, perhaps) about this film is not powerful enough to actually move me to go watch it, I thought I might watch instead an older film, this one also about a man trying to get back home.

I don’t have much to say about this film, except that Scorsese does an excellent job of balancing the tension and humour. Every time you think Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is going to catch a break, some fresh nonsense erupts, frustrating this expectation. Like Odysseus, Hackett returns to where he started out from, waylaid instead by masochistic sculptors, world-weary bartenders, lonely and vengeful waitresses, lunatic club-goers, an ice-cream truck driver, a vigilante mob, and two hapless thieves.