A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
With dainty atmosphere, gauzy acting, no pace at all. Vampire genre-blender of Iranian-American descent.
A bit of horror, a touch of romance, some western. Traces of film-noir and domestic drama, too. Yet for a mood piece, this genre-mixer went too linear. Which means it was story-driven, however scant and self-indulgent the plot: two characters linked by a chaste romance; minor sideline action — vampire killings and drug addiction; a derelict, small town setting. Pacing was dozy and glacial — in a failing manner. More successful sequences lulled you pleasantly (just about any night excursion of a vampire girl); the rest tested your patience for absorbing before-seen/rote situations in too slow a form. That slowness has to do with directorial sensibilities of Ana Lily Amirpour (making a feature debut here) — not everyone will share such leanings. Her preference is for introverted, ethereal, relationship-focused scenes. While in hunt for interesting shots and situations, her film was dragged by some excessive and moment-celebratory fat, which should have been trimmed in editing (10 minutes worth of cuts would save a lifetime; the present film was short, at 101 minutes, yet still caught you bored and stranded).
The titular bloodthirsty girl, her conceptualized persona and acting style (spare, suppressed; the latest in studied non-realism) — all film-worthy. Quite touching for a surface performance, in a light genre way (delivered by a classically handsome Sheila Vand). Typically for a vampire, she behaved otherworldly, lead a solitary and isolated life, exuded quietude or resignation, and carried an underlying threat of violence about her— attributes that are highly watchable. A black chador that she wore while out in the streets (the film took place in an Arabic country) gave her a deliberate look of a nun. Which suited that personality. Other women in the film did not wear such ascetic robes. That cloth — in its uniform, strongly contoured, inverted U-shape —augmented her already ghostly presence while prowling the city for bodies to kill. She often hunted on a skateboard — a bit twee of a prop; corny, syrupy piece of Americana. The male hero (Arash Marandi) was of a similar disposition, in that he too was isolated (as everyone in this film) — but also narcissistic, with a dreaminess about him that some viewers could perhaps find attractive, some not. The camera was fond of him — the feeling which you didn’t necessarily reciprocate. He had a bad habit of dressing and accessorizing like archetypal male protagonists of American cinema in the 1950s and beyond (white t-shirt and jeans, a belt, aviator sunglasses, statement hairstyle, a nostalgic convertible). This a minus if you frown upon self-referentiality in movies. /Another unwelcome nod to cinema’s past lied in the interior decoration of the vampire’s room — plastered with film posters and glamour shots of former sexpots./ That odd couple had some interesting scenes together; one in particular showed their impromptu ear-piercing procedure (with a safety pin sufficing as a needle, interestingly enough).
Sound design held your attention with low-frequency drones, tuned to vampire attacks (or would-be attacks), suggesting imminent danger. The choice of music was varied, some of it popular (most memorable — the use of White Lies’ Death, in a scene of burgeoning intimacy). The font picked for opening credits suggested an old western movie (not very stylish).
The cinematography was, at places, well-put, framed with rigor into thoughtful widescreen compositions (image quality is a prerequisite in moody, no-pace cinema). One simple scene of car-conversation was shot from mirror view reflections, for instance. Pulsating light sources were in use, numerous times. Why the black-and-white look was specifically chosen for the movie is a wonder. Possibly to differentiate it in a tough and competitive market of small-scale, festival-bound cinema (recent movies with b/w look in this reviewer’s memory —pretty excellent Ida and so-so Nebraska; the process is rare for a reason). Maybe it was de-colorized to mask the fact that this Iran-based film was filmed in California (not that you would know it from color vision). Most images were steady, which contrasted with a hand-held, decidedly unpleasant subplot about a drug-addicted father (this segment as if taken from another movie). The figure of a tattooed pimp (Dominic Rains), seen early in the movie, had a star moment of nimbly dancing bare-chasted in front of the chador-clad vampire demurely visiting his house, just before he was killed. Lastly, a lousy decision to include a cat in the movie — as if you needed another lone creature; there’s something inherently meme-ish and people-pleasing about such moves.
