January 24-2014
Now here is a film that’s different! It’s about a vampire wearing a chador and riding a skateboard in a ghost town.
It is premiering this month at the annual Sundance Film Festival in Utah.
“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” was shot in black and white in the United States for the US market with a mostly Iranian-American cast speaking Farsi. The writer-director is Iranian-American Ana Lily Amirpour in her debut effort.
And she has gotten a rave review from The Hollywood Reporter.
. . . writer-director
The film is set in Bad City, which is an ugly place. But the film is “gorgeous,” says Jim Morrison of The Hollywood Reporter.
“Beguiling in its strangeness, yet also effortlessly evoking recognizable emotions such as loneliness and the feeling of being stuck in a dead-end town and life, this moody and gorgeous film is finally more about atmosphere and emotions than narrative—and none the worse for it,” Morrison writes ecstatically.
But Morrison also says the movie will be “a tough sell commercially” although he expects film festival audiences around the world “should willingly line up for a spellbinding bite or two in the neck.”
In an interview, Amirpour was asked about her resort to what some see as the tired vampire genre. She said her film isn’t really about vampires. The movie “is really a story about battling loneliness. And vampires are the loneliest.”
Amirpour was born in Iran and reared in Europe before moving to California. “That’s a real mash-up,” she said. “And I feel that this film really is a true mash-up too. When you’re so many things, it’s great because then you don’t really have to be defined by any one thing. You pick from what means something to you and what turns you on, and makes sense. That’s really what I did in making this film in order for it to be something that turned me all the way on.”
The protagonist of “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” isn’t the chador-clad girl walking alone but Arash (played by Arash Marandi), who is seen in the opening shot in a white T-shirt and jeans, leaning against a fence a la James Dean. Arash’s 1950’s car confirms the archetype, though when he later passes a ditch full of corpses, it’s clear this film isn’t happening in the US or Iran but the dark imagination of Amirpour.
Arash, who has worked six years to pay for his car, must look after his father, Hossein (Marshall Manesh), a junkie and gambling addict who owes a lot of money to Saeed (Dominic Rains), a heavily tattooed dealer. Saeed decides to walk away with Arash’s car keys when Hossein can’t pay him.
This event will eventually connect all the characters, including the girl of the title (Sheila Vand), who is the vampire in a chador and, occasionally, on a skateboard; a solitary prostitute (Mozhan Marno), and a street urchin (Milad Eghbali) that the nameless vampire scares half to death.
The girl and Arash meet as the girl is walking home alone at night and Arash, who’s lost, bumps into her. This moment also gets the biggest laugh, as audiences will be aware by this point that she’s a vampire and Arash, who’s just been to a costume party, is dressed as Dracula.
Morrison says, “For a film written and directed by a female filmmaker, the women are more enigmatic, although the film’s plentiful Western references might suggest this is simply genre convention as well as a reflection of the straightjacket Iranian society can represent for women.”
Morrison says the movie “is really a film of hushed tones and quiet rhythms, especially as it develops into an unlikely, delicately handled love story of sorts.”