This latter is fine, a familiar part of the filmic furniture for anyone who has seen Christine (1983) or The Car (1977).
Obviously you have to buy into the rules of the game: you can’t just knock on anyone’s door for help the police will be dicks there will only be one police car and it will be the one full of dicks the cab driver will be able to find them as though the pair were programmed into his SatNav and, as ever, people being chased by a car must always run in a straight line for an unseemly amount of time before belatedly realising this is a really bad idea. But before that happens, Night Fare is pretty good stuff.
Unfortunately someone didn’t think that would be enough, and the last third of the movie shifts gears way too abruptly, the back door swings open and coherence’s seat belt snaps and it tumbles out, becoming just a bloody snail trail in the movie’s wake. In fact if it had just stuck to the psycho-stalk cabdriver premise it would have been a nifty little movie. I don’t want to be too hard on Night Fare, it does a lot of things very well indeed for most of its run-time after all. The driver takes umbrage to excessive levels and stalks the bickering pair through the eerily unpopulated Parisian night, a night in which interpersonal conflicts will be settled forever and one person will discover an unexpected future. Unfortunately the pair take a taxi and dun the driver on the fare Luc as a hilarious joke to show Chris who is in control and Chris, because he is English and follows the path of least resistance. Increasingly unsettled by Luc’s blatant drug huffing and overbearing passive aggression Chris complies, because Chris is English, and thus believes confrontation must be avoided at all costs. Determined to make sure the night is one to remember Luc cajoles moody Chris into accompanying him to another party. After the trio’s internal tensions spoil the initial part of the evening’s partying, Ludivine begs off and goes home, taking Luc’s car. Luc is understandably a little edgy about this, but even edgier about the reason Chris left. Ludivine still resents Chris for leaving her without any whiff of warning, and has shacked up with Luc in the meantime. I checked the videos again before realising that the figure should be facing the other way around, but it would have looked a little odd just as an illustration, so I dropped that round of edit.Īlighting from the stale fart and sweaty sock ambience of a London-Paris coach, Chris (Jonathan Howard) is reunited, after a two year self-imposed absence, with Luc (Jonathan Demurger) and Ludivine (Fanny Valette). After finishing the illustration, I knew that there was something unusual about it. I had taken help of a GoPro video of Allison Stokke practicing the jumps. While teaching and in practice, I always mention this - A good Illustrator informs himself of the subject he/she is working with. I am not particularly great with human anatomy in drawing, so I had got a scaled down figure with movable limbs to help me visualise certain poses, especially where the perspective is heavily in play. I decided to pick a top view shot here because it helped in building the tension and fear of fall, the virtue of taking a risk, a leap of faith. That always made me look for interesting point of views that can be used in illustration to bring a certain mood or emotion. Back in college, I came across Afro Samurai, an anime that had the most beautifully done fight sequences with exaggerated use of perspective. For me the process here is far more worth sharing than the finished illustration. Throwback to this illustration I had done for CMR’s 2019 calendar.