Tell me if this sounds familiar:
A guy walks into a pool hall, plays some games for money, and promptly loses. With a little luck, he wins on an “impossible” shot and then doubles his earnings by again making the same impossible shot. Feeling cocksure, he seeks out the best known player in town for a much bigger pot. He goes on a roll, winning multiple games, but then gets psychologically battered and ultimately loses everything. Determined to regain his stature, he tries to make some quick buck hustling. It goes well for a while, until he hustles the wrong person and gets his arms fractured. A woman rehabilitates him, loves him, and helps him regain his confidence. He returns to finally beat the best known player, but his victory comes with a very painful price.
Of course, I’m summarizing The Hustler. Except I’m not. (Perhaps, the fractured arms rather than broken thumbs was the giveaway). I’m actually describing Night To Be Gone, an English-language billiards movie from Loren David Marsh that first released in Germany in January 2024, and is now available to watch on Amazon Prime.
Night To Be Gone is the story of Omer (Alpha Omer Cissé), a young West African refugee with a difficult family history, and Carine (Sylvaine Faligant), a recovering heroin addict from Marseille. They are itinerant grifters who both bring a lot of metaphoric baggage to the baize. Pool hustling is a path to fast cash. They arrive in Berlin so they can ultimately challenge The Sultan, a notorious and mysterious pool hustler to an all-night showdown of 10-ball with a minimum pot of 10,000 Euros. Each game is 1,000 Euros, and the match is not over until the money runs out or both players decide to quit. Not surprisingly, they get hustled by The Sultan, who preys on their egos and erodes their cool veneer with racist and suggestive taunts. They lose all their money, forcing them to re-evaluate their get-rich-quick plans and ultimately their relationship with one another.
Let me start with the favorable, as there are a handful of elements in Night To be Gone that are impressive – and distinct from The Hustler. The boldest and most interesting decision is that Omer is a dark-skinned, outsider from West Africa. He is an alien, a cypher to everyone he meets. But, this allows Omer to engage in some very intentional social engineering. Pool hustling is already a form of psychological manipulation. Omer compounds it by assuming racial identities that further this psychological influence. (This is both ironic and interesting, given the Sultan’s “African Prince” jeers contributed to Omer’s initial unraveling.) Among the conservative Bavarian businessmen, Omer is a welfare recipient. Playing against the liberals, he is a poor African whose village burned down. He is a drug dealer in one game, a bebopping hipster in another. Ever the racial chameleon, Omer engages people in underestimating him, which becomes their weakness, at least until it backfires on Omer when two Bauerntrampel don’t appreciate being hustled.
Night To Be Gone is also a beautifully shot film. With its atmospheric black-and-white photography by Vlad Margulis and Florian Wurzer, and its eerie electronic scoring by Paul Brody, the film evokes a noirish 1940s aesthetic. Further contributing to this style is the movie’s pacing, selection of settings, and unsettling camera techniques. It works especially well for the filming of the billiards shots. Nothing feels rushed or manic; the shots are not contrived. It’s a game played for an audience of no one.
Unfortunately, these positives get overshadowed by billiards movie déjà vu, that gnawing sense we’ve seen this exact movie before. Night To Be Gone doesn’t feel like a tribute to The Hustler, certainly not the way the recently-reviewed Mr Doom felt like an ode to The Color of Money. Rather, Night To be Gone feels like it’s trying to be The Hustler. As such, there is no suspense, no uncertainty, no question what will happen or how it will end.
Arguably, Night To Be Gone is better classified as a remake of The Hustler. The British director Mark Murphy says, “a successful remake requires a delicate balance. It must simultaneously respect the original, bring something new to the table and feature effective casting. When these elements coalesce, the end product is a film that pays tribute to its predecessor while confidently standing on its own.”
In this case, the “something new” is race – not just the casting of Omer, but the use of race as it pertains to hustling. Such terrain has been covered in other con artist/hustling movies – e.g., White Men Can’t Jump; Six Degrees of Separation; The Distinguished Gentleman – but never in billiards.
This feels like an accurate take on Night To Be Gone, except the director Marsh disputed it, claiming The Hustler is “an inspiration,” nothing more. If it’s not a remake, why does it feel like one? If it is a remake, why not lean into it?
Ultimately, it probably doesn’t matter. This cinematic conjecture is the milieu of film critics who can work themselves into a tizzy parsing meaning and pontificating to an audience of no one, when the real question is whether the film is entertaining. And, on that topic, Night To Be Gone holds its own.
