Lisette Bailey is clearly the most stylish and important director working in Adult Cinema, not yet appreciated but releasing a consistently impressive series of features for the French label Dorcel.
"After Dark" is all about mood, with minimal dialogue or story, yet engrossing via Liselle's customary attention to little details and great visual style. (It also benefits from a hypnotic keyboards and percussion musical score credited, as usual, to Dorcel.)
Anita Rover stars and handles voice-over narration, portraying a young brunette who has insomnia, which she combats by taking a jog on the mainly empty streets of the city after dark. (French title is better: "Quand la nuit tombe" = When Night Falls.)
Rover's jogging knits together the stories of people after dark, including of course Anita herself. It's not clear whether these stories are really occurring or merely Rover's fantasies. They are sexual liaisons, a lesbian coupling for Rover with similar-looking brunette Alice Drake, a quiet "sex in the office" between very beautiful (and busty) blonde Alice Wild as a highly unlikely cleaning lady (it only happens in the movies) and young office worker Sam Bourne; a cat burglar played by Ariana Cortez who humps security guard Max Deeds; an ambulance EMT played by Black actress Selva Lapiedra, who has sex with police detective David Perry in the lavatory at a bar and finally Rover servicing her neighbor Luke Hardy when she returns home from her run. A delghtful final shot of Luke and Anita sleeping peacefully in bed together implies that sex, not running, is a possible cure for our heroine's chronic insomnia.
The staging and editing of one of these sex scenes and what follows is mysterious, even cryptic, and perhaps significantly its detail is omitted entirely from the otherwise thorough synopsis of the movie on the Dorcelvision home website.
Overall, "After Dark" reminded me of a British movie I haven't seen in decades (but will rewatch now on DVD), the sombre "Four in the Morning" by Anthony Simmons, which was Judi Dench's first significant movie role back in 1965, earning her a "Most Promising Newcomer" BAFTA award. While Simmons emphasized a tone of loneliness and even despair, Liselle Bailey opts for eros in her feature.
