A mediocre editor experiences the worst night of his life after he meets a girl in a coffee shop and agrees to visit her in Soho.

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Scorsese has almost all of his movies about New York, and they hardly pass for promotional pamphlets. But while most of them are about the urks, the marginalized and the limitedly sane – and we can assume that it’s not about us, I mean not about them, but about the marginalized – the main characters of “After Work” are ordinary people after a difficult day, and the events take place not in Queens, not in Brooklyn, not in the Bronx even, but in bohemian Soho in Manhattan. Behind God’s back. Here you can’t say that the city is good, just that the neighborhood is not great. Scorsese, however, even though he writes his hometown, he seems to imply something broader. Wider, that is.

A programmer gets acquainted in a cafe with a girl who, like him, is fascinated by Miller’s tropics. In the evening he arranges a meeting and, anticipating a light flirtation, and then, who knows, maybe a full-fledged one, goes to visit her. The cab driver came with a bad luck, he drove like a bitten man, and the twenty dollars he had saved for the evening was blown away like a wind. Actually, it was blown away. Which turned out to be only the first in a series of strange, sometimes comical, but more often unpleasant incidents. To recount them is a thankless task for several pages in 14-point font, I will only note that he came to work in the morning still without a spear in his pocket, unwashed, unshaven, and, moreover, covered with a layer of plaster; he had not eaten, had not slept, and did not know the soon-to-be-named body.

And all it cost was to lose the money. Money – and don’t try to check – turned out to be the constant without which ties fall apart like a domino castle. He found himself unnecessary, superfluous, extraneous, alien – the friendly city had turned him away from neon grace for a long, long night.

He was saddened to learn that outside the usual context – worker, consumer, resident – he was nothing more than an exhibit at the absurdity fair. That suicide takes less time than a cup of coffee; that everyone is himself and everyone is against him; that to become relevant, one must instantly cut one’s Mohawk. Everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone will listen to it, and he, however, had no reason to marvel; in the morning he himself had missed the client’s outpourings, but now that half the neighborhood was after him, both on foot and with special equipment, he had to listen to the bad girl’s stories in order to keep his own skin safe.

The most notable maxim came from the two burglars who stole the sculpture. Are you sure it has value?” asks one. Well, of course – answers the other – it’s art, and it is the more valuable, the uglier. The mouth of the schnyfer dropped the truth. In an ugly dream – why shouldn’t an ugly fairy come with an ugly lullaby?

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (80.0 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Audio
English: Dolby Digital Mono
English: FLAC Mono

Subtitles
English SDH.