“If a storm came over that mountain right now…What difference would it make?”
The Universe was missing a piece. It needed a black and white movie about a skateboarding vigilante feminist vampire. Now we have been blessed with one. This is the story of a young (well, maybe) vampire patrolling the streets of a fictitious Iranian city. The movie’s not about sucking the lifeblood out of people, though that happens. It’s about love. With a little side dish about justice.
Writer/director Ana Lilly Amirpour relies on all the vampire lore as a given, the starting point, and the foundation for building her story, without utilizing a single cliché. No contact lenses or white makeup pass in front of the camera here. She regenerates the vampire canon by relying on good acting rather than cheap props. She neither flouts nor circumvents the vampire movie conventions. She uses them as a framework which is already understood by the audience, and expands her story on top of that.
This movie has everything going for it: good writing, spectacular photography, sympathetic characters, and a soundtrack that works as another voice in the play.
The story unfurls in a place so awful that there is a town body dump, and no cops. It’s a depopulated, spoiled wasteland. The only signs of life are occasional distant headlights. The omnipresent oil machines endlessly suck the lifeblood out of the landscape, untended by human hands. The only people who go out at night are hunters and prospectors – the urban kind. Set in “Bad City,” Iran, the picture was filmed near Bakersfield, California. In this place, there’s no way to tell the difference between the natural clouds and the pollutants rising from the oil works into the sky.
This place could be a feast of unhappiness, where everyone has given up hope that good exists in the world. Instead, the age old conflict between good and evil is still going strong, even in this forsaken slag heap of a place. It starts immediately. The Boy in this story, Arash, is a decent fellow. We can tell that because 1) he has a job; 2) he has a car that he worked to pay for; 3) he takes care of his father; and 4) he protects the reputation of the young woman whose family he works for, though she thinks he’s ridiculous for doing so. Unfortunately, Arash’s father, Hossein, is a junkie. Hossein’s dealer claims Arash’s beautiful car for Hossein’s unpaid drug debt.
The dealer, Saeed, is also a pimp. He harasses his prostitute, Atti, about getting too old for the job. He smacks Atti, cheats her, and throws her out of his (Arash’s) car onto the street.
Enter our girl.
Of course Saeed has a pet shark. The poor man has to do so much to pump himself up for a sexual encounter with Our Lady of the Night, you almost feel bad for him by the time he’s finally ready. All his aggression hides insecurity. Like most bullies, he’s a physical coward and is cowed by physical pain. Which the vampire helps us to discover.
The Girl (she is so labeled in the credits) demonstrates what she can do for him with her mouth on his finger. Atti had done the same thing for him, before he brutalized her. He does not understand what this girl plans to suck out of him.
Sheila Vand, who plays the vampire, has a face that’s both old and young. Sometimes she looks like a kid; other times she looks like the years are wearing on her. Sometimes she just looks completely emptied. Mostly her eyes read as black, but here and there we see light.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is Amirpour’s first feature length film. She is a woman of multiple talents: she is a painter and sculptor, and fronted an art band before devoting her abilities to making films. She created a graphic novel series following the life after dark of the titular Girl of the movie. In auteur fashion, Amirpour appears briefly in a nightclub scene.
Amirpour paid special attention to the soundtrack. She has said that the music was written into the script as a facet of each character, and that she can’t imagine hashing together a soundtrack at the end of shooting. It shows; the soundtrack really works in giving extra voice to the people in the movie, filling out the sparse dialog and acting as a herald of the action and the characters’ feelings. In Jim Jarmusch’s excellent vampire film of a year ago, Only Lovers Left Alive, he used music from his own band for the soundtrack, writing songs specifically for the scenes in which they were used. Similarly, Amirpour stated that she created some of her scenes around the music, rather than the other way around. When a filmmaker is this committed to the music in a film, it really makes a difference. It reinvents the way a soundtrack works.
Girl is about good and evil, and love, in a fatally flawed world. There is evil in the world. It is a fact. Every person has the capacity for evil, and almost everyone commits some evil during their lives. After the dealer’s death, Arash takes over his drug business. He’s a good person, doing a dirty job. Arash may not know what the Girl is, but he knows what she does. And he accepts that if a storm comes over the mountains, it won’t make any difference. You can choose to love anyway. Good and evil play out externally on the grand stage of life, but also internally, inside every person. The evil within you – and your partner – will always exist. There will always be evil, and there will always be hope. Evil, like love, just is. Good and evil are the lonely, unchanging landscape against which life plays out. Even among the poor, sad denizens of this hollow hell, there are degrees, choices.
The Girl says, “I’ve done bad things. I’m bad.”
Arash says, “Obviously.”
He does not yet know what she will do to his father, but he will come to terms with that, too, after she admits it, without flinching, with her eyes.
Atti the prostitute acts as the catalyst for how the vampire chooses her victims. Hossein, Arash’s father, like Saeed the pimp, abuses Atti, binding her hands and shooting her up against her will. After all, one person shooting up is just a debased junkie; two is a party. The vampire sucks the evil out of him for it, along with his blood. Though Atti looks older than the Girl and clearly has a lot more of certain kinds of experiences, the Girl protects her. You get the idea that the Girl has been around and seen far more than Atti ever will. Her décor dates from the early Eighties, and she’s amassed a sizeable collection of goodies from her victims over the years.
The Girl rides her stolen skateboard down the desolate streets, her chador billowing around her like a superhero’s cape. She uses a kind of scared straight strategy to frighten a local boy (called the Street Urchin in the credits) so that he never becomes the kind of man she will have to feed upon. The movie often feels like a Western, and shares the values of love, justice, and retribution with that genre. There’s a sense of “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us” theme here, but the Girl is not the good guy in a white hat – she’s a feral bloodsucker in a black veil. She polices the badlands, while ads for a smarmy lawyer advertising his services protecting women who have been treated badly or abandoned play on every TV. The Good Guys here are hardly spotless.
Even the cat is a good actor. I don’t know how you get a cat to look in the right direction and have the right facial expression, but somehow it was managed. All the performances are excellent. The drama builds upon eyes and small changes in facial expressions, rather than big gestures and words.
Drugs always constitute the metaphor of choice for vampire movies. People who suck the energy out of others, who contaminate others with their own misery, who ruin lives out of their own loneliness and pain – these are the true vampires, and Arash’s junkie father Hossein and Saeed the drug dealer are two of these.
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Loneliness runs through the movie like the drainage wash that holds the town’s unfortunate dead. How each character deals with it compiles into the journey of the movie as a whole. Eternity lingers in the background of the movie as the barren, unvarying landscape behind the pitiable little houses. The machines keep pulling the oil out of the veins of the land, the bloodsuckers keep hurting people. It is a timeless space, and nothing will ever change there. Perhaps the promise of eternal life is no promise at all, just an endless, unalterable series of dirty deeds.
When Arash meets the Girl for the first time, he says, “I’m lost.” He means it literally, but it reveals his deep life as well. He’s high on Ecstasy, and that’s both a fact and a metaphor as well. Arash is solicitous, even protective of women; he surprises her. Though not at all sinless – he steals, he deals, he is callous to other males – he nonetheless shines like gold in this dark and terrible place.
Lyle Vincent’s poetic, haunting cinematography delights the eyes. Every frame is a work of art. As with the music, the photography advances the story. It helps to tell the story as if it were a non-speaking character with a lot of presence. It speaks, but not with dialog. Vincent creates many fine visual moments, as well as interesting details: a wrecked car sits askew in the background as Atti keys the pimp Saeed’s new car. Amirpour and Vincent allude to many iconic film genres and images, while creating something entirely new. It is a beautiful, fresh design cut from a tired old cloth.
This is a wonderful film. It happens to be about a vampire. For some people, that alone will shove it into some lesser, dusty category of work, where it doesn’t deserve to go. That it is also shot in black and white, and the dialog is Farsi with English subtitles, does not bode well for widespread commercial success. Yet it is unique: a vivid new take on an old, old story.
Atti says that only idiots and rich people believe that change is possible. Luckily, Amirpour proves her wrong.
9/10
This review was originally published on Dec 9, 2014
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