Martin Scorsese
Fuori Orario

Monotony is the grave of certainty.

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) had made the office his personal grave, four walls in which to revel in the weary passage of days, all sweetly the same, all exquisitely boring. The sudden and unexpected encounter with Julie (Rosanna Arquette), the appointment for the evening, plunges Paul into a series of implausible and grotesque situations, encounters with bizarre characters from New York by night, all ready to help him, all ready to devour him.

In this black comedy Scorsese draws a clear line between daytime New York, false and hypocritical, and nighttime New York, seductive and vampiric. Scorsese's vampires do not live in grim castles and do not feed on blood, but are composed of bartenders, frustrated waitresses, clumsy burglars, romantic sculptresses, enraged crowds, all hungry for daytime normality.

At sunset, New York sheds its apparent perfection to don the clothes of a luxury harlot, charming and deceitful at the same time. Paul thus becomes a stranger in a strange land, victim of capricious fate, pampered and then plundered by these Lords of the night, finally free from the prison of invisibility built around them by the sun's rays. The woman, from a perfect "nobody," transforms into a cunning, formidable, and fickle huntress; small bars, from quiet places of refreshment become deadly traps, and even a small and cozy apartment, in the wrong (or right, depending on the point of view) hands, becomes a place of unbridled and dangerous greed.

The nightmare for Paul "the bored," begins at sunset, as soon as he decides to kick secure monotony to immerse himself in the streets of an unknown New York. The language spoken by Paul, the everyday one, in this alternative New York, is absolutely incomprehensible: he will try to explain what is happening to him, seeking comfort in others' understanding, but will find only mistrust or feigned compassion.

In flight from the sad everyday life, seeking only "a simple date," he will be overwhelmed by events, obtaining much more than he asked for. He will face his fears and come out defeated yet victorious at the same time: humiliated, mistreated, pursued, plaster-dirty he will find himself, at dawn, before his office, ready to start another day but, perhaps, with a new strength and a different spirit.

Palme d'Or for direction at Cannes, hallucinatory and hallucinatory film, with a frenetic pace, without respite. The ordeal of the average man, a tortuous path in lucid madness and a return to normalcy that has the value of a comeback.