MUBARAK ALI files an appreciation of Martin Scorsese's surreal and dexterous “After Hours”.

IT TAKES A certain level of sadism to get the most out of Martin Scorsese's surreal composition on the horrors of big-city nightlife, and perhaps that's why After Hours has remained one of his perennially underrated films. The film represents a withdrawal from the Scorsese-De Niro pairings that became fashionable post-Taxi Driver, into a more modest affair, and it's in this breaking free of convention and expectation that the film conveys the kind of passion usually evident when a major Hollywood director goes back to his 'quirky' Indie roots – a film-geek fanaticism that is absent in Scorsese's later studio films. It won him Best Director at Cannes, and constitutes his best attempt in working with the medium as a form of art, while remaining highly engaging and asserting intrinsic Scorsese obsessions. And it's light years away from his last film, the mammoth hot-air balloon, Gangs of New York.

The film begins with the camera swirling over a sea of word processors (how eighties is that!) and rapidly zooming in on Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), who seems bored training a newcomer as the workday heavily approaches an end. Cut to him reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in a restaurant where he meets the film's First Crazy Blonde, Marcy (Rosanna Arquette). She's a fan of the book too and they hit it off. She gives him the number of a friend, Kiki Bridges (the sexy Linda Fiorentino) who is a sculptor and makes bagel and cream cheese paperweights, and they eventually arrange to meet there, setting in motion a series of unfortunate events that become increasingly surreal and darkly humorous as the night progresses. For someone who just wanted to get screwed in the first place, Paul goes through hell as he gets trapped in SoHo, New York City: after losing all his money and thereafter being stuck downtown, he'll be indirectly involved in a suicide, escape a forced attempt to shave his head into a Mohawk in a punk nightclub, interrupt an S&M session where the man interrupted thinks he "lacks discipline", and be insanely embroiled in serial burglaries that have been taking place in the area that night and the misinformed, murderous gang of New York that has been hunting him for said burglaries.

And then there are the femmes, whom Scorsese uses to demonstrate the film's cynical view of contemporary relationships. Every single woman Paul unwittingly gets involved with during the night is grandly – hilariously – fucked-up, each different characteristic somehow adding up to an abstract nightmarish collage of the female psyche. There's the paranoid, passive-aggressive Marcy. There's Teri Garr's Julie who is desperate to seduce Paul with her oh-so-60s mojo – the sort of woman your grandma probably warned your dad about. Then there's Catherine O'Hara's Gail, the unbalanced and sadistic ice cream vender. And finally there's Verna Bloom's disturbingly complying June, who helps Paul escape from the mob by plastering him all over (while Peggy Lee's Is That All There Is plays on the soundtrack), and then refusing to let him go because no one else will dance with her.

The film's explicit likeness to a dream is borne directly out of the omnipresent and subconscious need to escape, ostensibly from the constant trappings of an undesired job or the detachment associated with discontented big-city life: Paul is eternally bored at work, Julie hates her job as a waitress, and Gail is more trying to convince herself than Paul when she indignantly maintains that her job "isn't boring". The film's evocation of a Kafka-esque vortex of an ordinary man caught in seemingly incomprehensible circumstances – the stylistic features it shares with Carol Reed's Odd Man Out and Orson Welles' brilliant The Trial – are furthered to include the horrors of nocturnal downtown NYC, the city that has come to represent the centre of the director's mania. In After Hours, he has fashioned a New York City with steaming roads and an endless web of dark streets with bars and clubs, infested with all sorts of freaks and loners – it is probably the only time Scorsese successfully depicts the city as an amorphous canvas through which the distorted temperament and contemporary fears of its inhabitants are filtered. It is bent and exaggerated and proudly over-the-top, but it works to great effect.

Martin Scorsese is also a director who likes to show off, and he does so by working in collaboration with his usual team: Michael Ballhaus, who worked so frequently with Fassbinder in the 70's, uses his characteristic zooming lens and adds some disorienting camera angles. Cast in the shadows, the femme fatales, and the proverbial fish-out-of-the-water protagonist, and you've got Scorsese's homage to the film noirs he's so fond of. Thelma Schoonmaker's unrestrained editing formally crystallises the acts of inspired lunacy, as do of course, the crazies themselves; Teri Garr's unravelling and undersexed Julie stands out tallest among the others. Griffin Dunne too, is hilarious as the film's central disoriented creature, grappling at the remains of his sanity ("I just wanna go hooome!") He does, by daybreak, literally get dropped right at the entrance of his work and as he walks in and collapses at his desk, the film's heady cyclicity and déja vu become apparent. "Was it just a nightmare? Did I psych-out? Did I really not get laid last night?" The camera orbits the empty room in frenzy, and pulls back to Mozart's Symphony in D Major as the film draws to a close. It is a sudden ending, and one that appropriately leaves the film's absurdist nightmare-harbouring mid-space unexplained and undefined, and encourages the viewer to approach it (if at all) as one would in recalling a bad dream.