A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT
While most people seem to fixate on the "Persian vampire" aspect of the American-based Anglo-Iranian filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour's debut feature, what's striking about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is just how utterly pop-cultural-American it is. That doesn't make it any less Iranian in spirit, but its mix of Arabian Nights storytelling, American pulp fiction and indie-film existentialism is fascinating
Shot in widescreen black and white in the US with a cast of Persian-Americans or Iranian expats, somewhere between Jim Jarmusch's early anomie and the Sin City/Streets of Fire school of stylized mythology, Ms. Amirpour's film drops a ton of post-eighties teenage existentialism and gothic cool within its openly cinephile framework of Tehran, California. It could even be a Cure cover of a Bruce Springsteen song about kids wanting to escape the towns where they're going nowhere fast - in this case the son of a junkie ne'er-do-well who's a handyman for a rich family (Arash Marandi), and a mysterious girl who turns out to be a vampire surviving on petty thefts (Sheila Vand).
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a stronger film stylistically than narratively, with Ms. Amirpour's eye for visuals and strong sense of atmospherics making the most of a thin, underdeveloped plot whose blanks can occasionally seem clumsy rather than deliberate. Neither straight-forward homage nor smirking pastiche, its intimations of tragedy fall a bit flat and its Persian background lend it a touch of the overly exotic, but there's visibly a very interesting director here in the making.
A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT
US, 2014, 100 minutes
cast Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Mozhan Marnò, Marshall Manesh, Dominic Rains, Milad Eghbali, Rome Shadanloo, Reza Sixo Safai
director/scriptwriter, Ana Lily Amirpour; cinematographer, Lyle Vincent (b&w widescreen); designer, Sergio de la Vega; costumer, Natalie O'Brien; editor, Alex O'Flinn; producers, Justin Begnaud and Sina Sayyah, Spectrevision and Say Ahh Productions in association with Logan Pictures and Black Light District
screened August 28th 2015, Lisbon, distributor screener
Shot in widescreen black and white in the US with a cast of Persian-Americans or Iranian expats, somewhere between Jim Jarmusch's early anomie and the Sin City/Streets of Fire school of stylized mythology, Ms. Amirpour's film drops a ton of post-eighties teenage existentialism and gothic cool within its openly cinephile framework of Tehran, California. It could even be a Cure cover of a Bruce Springsteen song about kids wanting to escape the towns where they're going nowhere fast - in this case the son of a junkie ne'er-do-well who's a handyman for a rich family (Arash Marandi), and a mysterious girl who turns out to be a vampire surviving on petty thefts (Sheila Vand).
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a stronger film stylistically than narratively, with Ms. Amirpour's eye for visuals and strong sense of atmospherics making the most of a thin, underdeveloped plot whose blanks can occasionally seem clumsy rather than deliberate. Neither straight-forward homage nor smirking pastiche, its intimations of tragedy fall a bit flat and its Persian background lend it a touch of the overly exotic, but there's visibly a very interesting director here in the making.
A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT
US, 2014, 100 minutes
cast Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Mozhan Marnò, Marshall Manesh, Dominic Rains, Milad Eghbali, Rome Shadanloo, Reza Sixo Safai
director/scriptwriter, Ana Lily Amirpour; cinematographer, Lyle Vincent (b&w widescreen); designer, Sergio de la Vega; costumer, Natalie O'Brien; editor, Alex O'Flinn; producers, Justin Begnaud and Sina Sayyah, Spectrevision and Say Ahh Productions in association with Logan Pictures and Black Light District
screened August 28th 2015, Lisbon, distributor screener
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