Ana Lily Amirpour 2014 USA
Starring: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Dominic Rains, Mozhan Marnò, Rome Shadanloo
When it comes to cinema, and several other things, I consider myself a pretty shameless geek and on the majority of occasions I'll know a decent amount about a film before I see it, not the narrative or any twists obviously (I don't want to spoil any surprise value it might have) but a little research is common. Sometimes reading a good review or hearing a recommendation will be enough to peak my interest, other times it'll be the involvement of a particular director or actor, a combination of the two maybe, although I've got to stop watching films just because Noomi Rapace is in them. Every so often though, as it was last January when I felt an irresistible urge to see the blackly comic Israeli horror film Big Bad Wolves, a description alone will do the job. So when I was first told about Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, an Iranian vampire western, it was a hook that Elijah Wood's name on the production credits never could be and I immediately decided that I had to see it, there was no 'might'. Now the words 'Iranian vampire western' don't exactly cling together but luckily that's of little concern to the film itself, not least because none of them really apply to it. Amirpour certainly is of Iranian descent (although she was born in England and raised in Miami) and the film is performed solely in Persian and set in an albeit fictional Iranian ghost town called Bad City (actually Taft in California) but it could be anywhere and the finished product is totally unlike any other Iranian film in practically every way imaginable, a sweet sequence that references Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon (not to mention Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon) aside. If anything its monochrome, hipster aestheticism resembles Jim Jarmusch's early work, ironically it's nothing like his own recent vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive though. The black and white images along with main man Arash's James Dean get-up also call to mind Gus Van Sant's debut Mala Noche while his female counterpart frequently sports a Breton striped shirt similar to the one Jean Seberg wears in Jean-Luc Godard's nouvelle vague classic À bout de soufflé. Similarly vampires figure only marginally. The main character, named only The Girl, is a vampire but there are no others and her killings have less to do with bloodlust then they do with cleaning the wasteland she's made her home of the vile men corrupting it. One victim, a violent, wholly unpleasant pimp and drug pusher with a Pac-man tattoo marking a target on his neck, she tempts by fellating his finger then biting it off, figuratively castrating him, before colouring his lips with blood and ripping his throat out. Another, a young boy, she simply threatens, not just because he's witnessed one of her transgressions but so he'll be a gentleman in future. She's like a shy, oddly feminist Clint Eastwood rolling into San Miguel. Likewise her chador and the idea of her "walking alone at night" are not signs of her weakness but of a silhouetted occult power that unnerves even the nastiest of villains. And far from the classic scores of Ennio Morricone we hear swatches of indie music, both as a soundtrack and played by The Girl in the dank but heavily decorated room, appearing and disappearing, draining away amid a drone as the camera passes the ditch full of cold bodies that has become part of the furniture; White Lies' Death swirling in an adorable yet profoundly erotic seduction scene, she on a pinched skateboard, Arash on ecstasy and in a Dracula costume. Back at her place she holds back from savaging his bared neck in favour of resting on his chest listening to the pounding of the heartbeat she's missed so sorely. Blood seems to have been replaced by music, perhaps the only thing that keeps the youngsters going. As such The Girl's resting place is covered in pictures of the bands she adores and when Arash plans to leave the first thing he packs are his CD's. There's also a pleasing equality in the true sense of the word with The Girl still the title character but sharing a similar amount of screen time as her male paramour. To be honest it's possible neither are even the point-of-view character as the cat Arash claims as his own in the opening moments breaks the forth wall, suffers at the hands of all the people we see The Girl kill and matches her silent, night-stalker ethic. There's also the fact that a cat's colour vision is less intense than humans, not quite black-and-white but something like the film's visuals. Despite all this the plot is somehow minimal and there are many points, as in The Girl's gorgeously awkward contemplation of a hamburger, where not much of note happens for long periods of time. This is certainly nothing new and not always a problem but here, as wonderful and unusual as parts of it can be, it's hard not to feel underwhelmed by the film as a whole as, for all its splendour, it just didn't stick in my mind or linger in my thoughts as I might have hoped.
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