Louis C.K.\u2019s decision to make Tomorrow Night, his never-released, independently financed first feature from 1998, available for $5 on his website, is the kind of offhandedly iconoclastic gesture that has endeared the comedian to his fans (a group to whose ranks I belong). Nothing C.K. makes quite fits into the categories that pre-existed it, so why should his marketing and distribution techniques? His F\/X series Louie, now on a break between its third and fourth seasons, demolishes the barriers between stand-up and situation comedy (and plenty of other barriers, including the one between the lead character\u2019s fantasy life and his lived reality). C.K.\u2019s previous show, the short-lived Lucky Louie on HBO, was a less freewheeling but similarly unorthodox take on the sitcom form, a domestic comedy shot on deliberately fake-looking sets with low-quality video seemingly straight from the Norman Lear era.<\/p>\n
C.K.\u2019s only previously released theatrical feature, 2001\u2019s Pootie Tang, was a bizarre blaxploitation send-up about an African-American pop-culture sensation (the eponymous Mr. Tang, played by Lance Crouther) who spoke entirely in his own nonsensical but somehow universally comprehensible patois. (This clip gives some sense of the movie\u2019s odd rhythms and almost Situationist sense of the absurd.) While Pootie Tang puzzled most audiences at the time (and has since been semi-disowned by C.K., who says the film was recut by the studio to such a degree that he no longer considers it his), it\u2019s attracted a loyal cult following over the years. Viewed now, it\u2019s intermittently funny\u2014I\u2019ll always treasure the scene where the lady killer Pootie seduces a character by sensuously rubbing handfuls of cherry pie over his face and neck as R&B thrums in the background.* But the film is valuable mainly as a document of its director\u2019s early ambition and originality: One thing you could never accuse this defiantly strange movie of is fitting too neatly into a genre or industry slot.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s as if David Lynch had traveled back in time to collaborate with Sergei Eisenstein.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s twice as true of Tomorrow Night, which, viewed 16 years after its creation in a format that didn\u2019t exist when it was made, testifies to the degree to which the then 31-year-old Louis C.K. thought of himself as a filmmaker. Tomorrow Night is, in many ways, a piece of juvenilia, the arty thesis project of a guy who wasn\u2019t in film school (C.K. has said that he would have liked to study filmmaking at N.Y.U. if he\u2019d had the high school grades to get in). But it\u2019s the opposite of a slapped-together lark: Rather, it\u2019s formally experimental, thematically complex, and made with tremendous attention to craft. Shot on black-and-white 16 mm film in New York City with a cast made up of many of the rising comic talents of C.K.\u2019s generation (including, in wordless cameos, Amy Poehler and C.K. himself), Tomorrow Night displays a sureness of hand and a level of tonal control that\u2019s far removed from the everything-but-the-kitchen sink shagginess of many comic directorial debuts.<\/p>\n
The story\u2014and despite its digressiveness and apparent discontinuity, Tomorrow Night does consist of a story, not just a bundled collection of sketches\u2014concerns Charles (Chuck Sklar), the closed-off, socially inept proprietor of an exceptionally clean and well-run photo-developing business. Charles keeps his store\u2019s shelves sparkling and his customer files impeccably organized, but at a cost. He has no friends to speak of, let alone a girlfriend, and treats everyone who enters his shop like an unwelcome intruder. But this demeanor doesn\u2019t seem to deter Mel the Mailman (J.B. Smoove), an expansive U.S. postal employee who enjoys regaling the stone-faced Charles with raunchy anecdotes from his own life.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t until we see Charles come home from work one night that we first realize how far we are from rom-com-land, or for that matter from any recognizable genre category. After putting on an old-timey phonograph record, our expressionless hero gets out the ingredients for his secret nightly ritual: a tub of ice cream, a large metal bowl, and a chair. Charles, it turns out, can find sexual gratification only by sitting, naked from the waist down, in a bowl of ice cream\u2014a harmless enough fetish, but one that C.K. films in such a way as to make the practice look both abject and transcendent. (One late scene gives us a montage of Charles\u2019 interior fantasy world during a session of ice-cream frottage, and it\u2019s as if David Lynch had traveled back in time to collaborate with Sergei Eisenstein.) Charlie\u2019s clandestine fixation on frozen dairy desserts is clearly a metaphor for masturbation (a frequent subject of both mockery and meditation on Louie), but it also seems to stand in for something more. The disclosure of this unspeakable yet ludicrous secret becomes a sly joke about the cinematic deployment of secrets as both plot engines and revealers of character. Yes, we\u2019ve been given a glimpse into this man\u2019s most private and shameful ritual, but does that mean we know anything whatsoever about him? And is grinding one\u2019s pelvis into a jumbo serving of butter pecan any more ridiculous than whatever the rest of us get up to behind closed doors?<\/p>\n
The rest of the film will chronicle Charles\u2019s ongoing sexual misadventures, from a humiliating date with a cartoonishly vulgar hot-pants-clad tramp named Lola Vagina (Heather Morgan) to an even more ill-advised liaison with an elderly client at the photo store, Florence (Martha Greenhouse). The unhappily married Florence spends her days complaining on a park bench to a housewife pal (Rick Shapiro) whom she seems not to notice is actually a man in really bad drag. In a parallel plot, Florence\u2019s naive son Willie (Greg Hahn), who\u2019s been deployed with the Army for 20 years, tries to figure out why his mother has never answered a single one of his letters. As it turns out, two of his fellow soldiers (Robert Smigel and Steve Carell) have been throwing Willie\u2019s outgoing mail away for decades, a prank they confess to with hoots of cruel laughter filmed in grotesque close-up.<\/p>\n
Though it has no shortage of funny moments and strong comic performances, Tomorrow Night seems far less invested with making the audience laugh than it is in upending our expectations, dislodging our received ideas about what a film comedy should be. It\u2019s a chilly, slow-paced, at times deliberately alienating movie that nonetheless manages, by the end of its not-quite-90-minute running time, to touch on quite a few of the great mysteries of human life: loneliness, friendship, marriage, old age, death, the desire for a child. And throughout, C.K.\u2019s grasp of and facility with film-historical tropes is one of the movie\u2019s chief sources of delight. When Charles dials the number of one client whose photos are overdue for pickup, C.K. cuts to an interior straight out of an old Hammer horror film, where we see an old-fashioned phone ringing next to an inert, bloody gloved hand, a crystal decanter, and a box of dominoes. The identity of that hand\u2019s apparently dead owner, like the connection between this gothic B-movie universe and the everyday reality Charles inhabits, is never explained. The whole joke is that, through the magic of montage and directorial whim, such divergent worlds can unproblematically coexist in the same story.<\/p>\n
Along with David Lynch and Eisenstein, there\u2019s some John Cassavetes influence discernible in C.K.\u2019s method, and maybe a touch of John Frankenheimer, too, along with a generous dose of classic Hollywood. The imaginative original score by Neal Sugarman nimbly pastiches the style of old-fashioned orchestral scores from various genres, at one point including a series of harp arpeggios straight from the dream sequence of a \u201940s melodrama. Tomorrow Night feels like the work of a curious young filmmaker taking cinema apart to figure out how it works, tinkering under the hood. Though his innovative TV show and punishing stand-up schedule are keeping him more than busy enough for now, C.K. has made clear that he would be interested in making another feature film someday, perhaps self-financing it with the proceeds from the online sale of Tomorrow Night. If for no other reason than that, the $5 he\u2019s charging for this curious comic artifact seems like money well spent.