Apr 102014
 
three reels

In a Middle Eastern town, perhaps named Bad City or perhaps not, Arash (Arash Marandi) lives with his junkie father (Marshall Manesh) and works as a handyman, and perhaps middleman drug dealer. The main dealer and pimp (Dominic Rains) is coming down hard on him for his father’s debts, and takes the one thing that he owns, his car. To get it back, Arash steals jewelry from the daughter (Rome Shadanloo) of the rich people he works for. But his plans, as well as those of the pimp, go out the window when he crosses paths with a vampire (Sheila Vand) who prowls the streets at night.

Filmed in California with the characters speaking Farsi, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has been called a Noir, feminist, romantic, western, vampire flick, influenced by ‘50s youth cinema and the Iranian New Wave and taking on the systematic inequality of Iranian society, which I find odd as it is not most of those things. Sure, Arash has a James Dean feel about him and the picture does look like the Iranian short films that have been submitted to me over the last decade, but there’s nothing Noir here, and it’s about as unromantic a film as you can get. Also, having oil wells does not make something a western.

While it can stake a claim toward being feminist, I wouldn’t point toward this as an examination of women’s power in Iran. There are essentially 7 characters. Of the 3 women, one is a prostitute (at the bottom rung of society), one is a rich socialite (the most free and happy character in the film), and one is a vampire. Of the males, one is a street urchin (bottom rung), one a junkie (bottom rung), one a poor day laborer (bottom rung) and one a pimp (slightly higher). And that’s pretty much everyone. As that’s all there is to go by, it seems the real power is in the women’s hands. The vampire does have a habit of punishing men who misbehave toward women, but she also murders the homeless, so not even a power-fantasy.

It is accurate to say it’s a vampire movie. Beyond that, it’s really about personal longing and despair. It’s a Bruce Springsteen song brought to life, minus the song. Our main characters are young, with no future. They live in a nowhere town, with nowhere jobs. It’s empty and hopeless. Arash doesn’t know what he wants; he just wants something. The Girl, as that’s the only name the vampire is given, seems to be as lost, although there’s no way to tell if she’s a youth who can’t see any possibilities, or a thousand-year-old who has long since given up. The focus is on their despondency, and on the dreary world they inhabit. And it is empty in multiple ways as the city is nearly devoid of humans. No one walks or drives the streets by day, and by night they belong to The Girl. One could claim that the movie takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, where all but a few have died from an unspecified plague and nothing would contradict that.

All that sounds depressing, and it’s true the film isn’t uplifting or a laugh-fest, but it isn’t a gloomy watching experience either. Partly that’s due to the dream-like feeling of it, but mostly it’s The Girl. A beautiful, never-smiling young woman, in a hip striped shirt and covered with a Chador, stalking the few people that exist or skateboarding down the middle of the road, makes for wonderful images. She’s one of the great vampires, at least in design, and I can see her as the daughter or granddaughter of Lugosi’s Dracula.

It’s good that The Girl is such a powerful sight, and the atmosphere is so strong, as those have to do all the heavy lifting; there is barely a plot and the characters are thinly drawn. Little happens and nothing is settled. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night doesn’t exist to tell a story, but just to let you feel a nihilistic dream for a while. I’d have liked it to do more, but it’s enough.