Saturday Film Club #12: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Sheila Vand as 'The Girl'

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour 

Country of origin and year of release: US, 2014

This is one of those films where you find yourself thinking "Surely it can't possibly be as good as the trailer?" 

But it so is. 

I suspect that Amirpour's art house feminist vampire western hybrid, which also nods to 1950s Hollywood and James Dean films, is going to be the film for which my abilities as a would-be film blogger will be the most stretched and tested: It's quite possible that I will come spectacularly unstuck in the process. With that in mind, I feel very comforted by the fact that the always reliable Mark Kermode has written one of his most elegant salutes to A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, which you can read here. As such, I feel I have a safety blanket to cling to should I need it.

It's easy to feel intimidated about writing about A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Mainly because it's so bloody good, but also because it successfully juggles three film genres that I'm not entirely familiar with and  because it's set in a fictional Iranian lawless ghost town and the anti-heroine is a skateboarding, chador wearing avenging vampire. It's also entirely in Persian, but I feel that subtitles are less of a reason to be intimidated. 

The tellingly named Bad City is a stark wasteland and the sense of desperation and foreboding is enhanced by Amirpour's decision to film in black and white. Bad City has the same sense of bleakness and brutality as the favelas of Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's City Of God, but without the cheerful bits. Bad City is a place where young men have their cars repossessed to pay their fathers drug debts, where sex workers are menaced by pimps and forcibly injected with heroin, and where opportunity and fun are extremely hard to come by. It is, as Kermode acknowledges, a place sorely in need of an avenging angel. "What catches everyone off guard is that this avenging angel should take the form of Sheila Vand."

Vand as The Girl both imbues the image of the chador clad muslim girl with a sense of predatory menace and subverts existing stereotypes of muslim womanhood not only by casting her as the predator rather than the preyed upon, but by having her use her seemingly demure Islamic womanhood as a lure to draw in and capture various predatory men. As a character it's striking just how little dialogue she has in a film that is notably sparse in dialogue. 

By contrast, Arash Marandi, styled here as the central male protagonist (The Boy) in the form of "The Persian James Dean", fulfils the role of would be love interest for The Girl, but also someone to be protected by her. She first encounters him in a distressed state on his way home from a party at which his privileged would be lover has given him sparse attention. He is disorientated and vulnerable, dressed as Dracula and, ironically, in need of rescuing by this most unlikely of rescuers. 

There follows a series of intensely awkward encounters between the pair, notable for their tenderness amidst the brutality of life in Bad City and the many, many killings. 

As visually distinctive as Amirpour's film is, it's also got an equally distinctive soundtrack which features everything from 80s electro to modern indie rock, eastern dance music and the western soundtrack music. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night has all the hallmarks of a classic, but I think it's still - alas - more of a cult film at present.