Davide Ferrario's eccentric romantic comedy After Midnight was made by a movie lover for movie lovers, and its obsessions may not translate to those who don't know and love cinema, from Louis Lumière to François Truffaut. Giorgio Pasotti stars as a night watchman in Turin's Mole Antonelliana, a classic piece of Italian architecture that now doubles as the city's Museum Of Cinema. Francesca Inaudi plays a fry cook who holes up with Pasotti after she assaults her boss with a basket of hot oil. Fabio Troiano is Inaudi's boyfriend, a car thief who keeps her updated on the police search. While Inaudi toys with the affections of the two men—shades of Jules And Jim—Ferrario takes the audience on a tour of the museum and the fundamental debates surrounding the art and craft of filmmaking.
Silvio Orlando narrates After Midnight, filling viewers in on Pasotti's cineaste eccentricities, which include a preference for places and objects over characters and plots. Pasotti watches slapstick comedies for home-improvement ideas, and pores over the early cinema "actualities" that consist of little more than a few seconds of documentary footage from turn-of-the-century city streets. Pasotti even has his own hand-cranked camera, though he frequently dithers over what to shoot.
After Midnight's love triangle is intended to reflect a film artist's dilemma (action versus nuance), but as a story, it never develops beyond the routine, and Orlando's musings over whether Pasotti's cinemania interferes with his life come out stale. Still, the aesthetic philosophizing works as a framework for daring visual experiments: Ferrario shoots on digital video, which may seem an odd choice for a movie about the mesmerizing attraction of old celluloid, except that After Midnight is also about the democratizing power of popular art. Digital video is rapidly becoming a medium that lets movie buffs reproduce—and thereby explain—their particular fetishes. So Ferrario looks for ways that DV can achieve the same effects as traditional film stock. He relies on vivid color and streaks of light, trying to find images that burn the eyes in the same way that projector lights flicker, like flames illuminating the blackness.