Just when we think we've been bled dry by screen vampires, here comes another riff on the myth; and there's something incredibly fresh about this tale of the undead.
After all, how often do we see an Iranian vampire film, with nods to the spaghetti western and infused with an American indie sensibility?
Despite its plethora of film buff references, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is a focused and slightly hypnotic tale about a lone female vampire stalking the deserted streets of a blighted industrial city. Here she preys on men, notably pimps and drug addicts who themselves prey on women, while falling in love with a decent young chap who dresses like James Dean and has a fondness for cats.
Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour was born in England to Iranian parents, then grew up in America, where the film was made. Her urban hellhole could be anywhere (its name, Bad City, actually brings to mind the cartoon-like Sin City) and Amirpour isn't striving to make a film about Iranian society or politics. Arguably she's done something more radical, which is to make a genre film that just happens to be acted in Persian and whose Iranian milieu is merely sketched in shop displays, TV programmes and number plates.
The most striking cultural crossover is the form of the vampire herself (Sheila Vand). While her bob and Breton shirt evoke Jean Seberg in Godard's Breathless - and any number of subsequent indie heroines - during her nocturnal jaunts she's draped in an Iranian chador, whose traditional role of covering, nay subjugating, women is subverted by its spooky reinvention as a vampiric cloak. The girl's appearance and the gender of her victims are the closest the film gets to thematic resonance.
But her garb also offers the wonderfully arch first meeting between the girl and the sweet but troubled Arash (Arash Marandi) as he's leaving a fancy dress party the worse for wear having taken his first ecstasy pill - the vampire in a chador facing a mortal dressed as Dracula.
And for the most part, this feels like the debut of a film buff feasting on her new medium. The black and white photography, cool soundtrack (much of it courtesy of Iranian rock bands) and pretty young cast bring to mind the early films by Jim Jarmusch (who's actually made his own vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive); the soundtrack also offers some spaghetti western overtones to accompany the plot of a stranger cleaning a town of its bad guys; and one can feel the influence of Tarantino in the postmodern cultural referencing - including the cute joke of Debbie Harry and Patti Smith posters on the vampire's bedroom room sitting beside one of the Bee Gees, and the girl and Arash's shared appreciation of Lionel Richie.
This is as Iranian, then, as another recent debut by an Iranian-American, Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behaviour: not that much. Yet both are extremely accomplished. While the New York-based Akhavan's film was wordy and comic, in keeping with many of that city's most prominent directors, the Californian Amirpour's is more cinematic, with one lip-smacking moment after another: the casual reveal of a ditch full of corpses, a pimp's apt (and bloody) comeuppance, the girl's terrifying yet certainly effective challenge to a young boy - "Are you a good boy?" - the moment when Arash, ignorant of the fact that he's dating a vampire, offers to pierce his potential girlfriend's ears, her teeth popping out as he does so. The result is a stylish, intriguing, hugely enjoyable calling card of a film.
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