A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night released on VOD from Kino Lorber on March 20th, 2015
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is the film that Quentin Tarantino has been trying to make for the entirety of his career. How did Ana Lily Amirpour succeed, in her debut film, where Tarantino continually near-misses? She was able to blend genres (ghost town/Western, vampire kitsch, noir, foreign film) subtly, inject humor inoffensively, and to center it all around a complicated love story that does not tie up everything into a little bow at the end. I believe it is because Ana Lily Amirpour is so for real, and QT is a bit of a cultural pirate.
Before I have fan boys blocking me on Twitter, let me say that I am a big Tarantino fan, and I’d go so far as to say that Amirpour was most likely influenced by his work. But there was something about watching A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night that made me go, “Ohhhhhh *this* is what Tarantino has been attempting!” Unlike Tarantino’s work, Amirpour’s film is not derivative, and the little nods of camp (the boy dressed as Dracula dramatically swinging his cape around the actual vampire girl) never overwhelm the narrative. If you like Tarantino’s movies but are annoyed by how over-the-top they are, you’ll love A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The dreamlike quality Amirpour’s directing brings keeps it from ever trying too hard.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night creates a mood, one the viewer is instantly sunk into and does not want to leave. From the first shot, my viewing partner said, “Oh I really hope the whole movie looks like this,” and I had to agree. Gratefully, Amirpour’s vision is consistent, keeping the movie in beautifully lit black and white throughout, and using modern low-fi music to set the moody tone.
Set in the Iranian town of “Bad City,” a place of seemingly unmanned power plants and oil drills, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night centers around the life of Arash (Arash Marandi), a hard working young man who lives alone with his drug addicted father and spends his time trimming the hedges of rich ladies and driving around his beloved muscle car. Arash is the epitome of the frustrated masculine archetype, with his James Dean look, his propensity to punch brick walls instead of faces, his sense of propriety with women, and his slightly dangerous behavior. He’s no angel – he steals earrings from his boss to pay off the drug dealer who stole his car, and takes over his drug selling jaunt after he is out of the picture. However, he has his own code of ethics that he lives by, a value system that is thrown into extreme upset by the advent of The Girl.
We are introduced to The Girl (Sheila Vand of Argo) at first as a lurking presence, watching the drug dealer/pimp do some gangster shit on the outskirts of town. Our true introduction to her, however, is in a sequence my viewing partner and I had to replay several times before the night’s end. The Girl is alone at home, in her conspicuously-teenaged bedroom, dancing languidly and putting on make up. It’s a scenario known well to anyone who has ever been a young woman, although I don’t think anyone else has a poster that is a mash-up of Madonna and Margaret Atwood.
The scene endears the viewer to The Girl, before seeing her animal side come out, when she goes after the drug dealer. We connect with her and empathize with the way that she is lovely in her loneliness. This sets the tone for the love story, as we fall in love with her before Arash does, making it more believable that such an unlikely couple would come together. After this illuminating scene, she wraps herself in her chador, which doubles as a vampire cape, and goes out into the night.
Marshall Manesh, known for his comedic work on sitcoms such as How I Met Your Mother and Will and Grace, plays a deeply unfunny character here – the tragic Hossein. As Arash’s drug-addicted father, he creates a series of problems for his son that propel our anti-hero towards meeting his love, who is skulking around town on a stolen skateboard. He is also the reason the film ends on such a complicated note in regards to their relationship, but I will leave the wonder of that moment up to you.
In fact, there is a lot I don’t want to spoil in this review, so I’m shying away from sharing all the hilarious details of The Girl’s best kill. But they are there, and they must be experienced. My only criticism of this film is that The Girl doesn’t kill more.
The greatest feat of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is not that it is the first Iranian feminist vampire noir. It’s more nuanced than that. There’s a simmering tension that is never satisfied, because the film does not rely on the expected to sew everything up neatly. Amirpour flips the script on gender tropes, and has The Girl save the virtuous masculine character, rather than the other way around. She protects the neighborhood prostitutes, aligning herself with women even though they have the blood she craves. Most importantly, she saves herself.
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