A vampire tale by first-time feature director Ana Lily Amirpour works great as a horror genre piece...but it’s more:  an allegory of Iran.
By Jeff Shank

Sheila Vand in 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night'

In the years leading up to The Prague Spring of 1968, Czech filmmakers proved extremely inventive in making artful, often idiosyncratic low-budget films that made it through the Communist Film Censor Board.  The censors didn’t realize many of these movies were metaphorically about something far different than what was depicted on screen. 

The hidden meanings were readily deciphered by a savvy, well-educated Czech public who knew their freedom-loving Czech artists were fighting back against the dispiriting repression of the Soviet Block.  Each allegorical film slipped through the censors was a demonstration of what Vaclav Havel would come to coin “the power of the powerless.”

Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is wonderful entertainment:  a surrealist horror vampire film shot in beautiful B & W anamorphic wide screen with nods to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western classics, James Dean, and the poetic artistry of David Lynch.  The visual compositions, like the performances and writing, are spare and powerful.  And the music?   It heightens and comments on the on-screen action masterfully; Ana Lily has selected it with the skill of a Quentin Tarantino.

For American audiences, the fact that Taft, California (with its landscapes of oil wells) stands in for Iran, and the characters happen to speak Farsi with English sub-titles, only contributes to its strange, hypnotic appeal. 

This film can be thoroughly enjoyed for its muscular mash-up of American pop cultural influences and the scares it serves up as a horror genre piece. 

But there is definitely something else at work here. 

There is this sense of despair and gloom which permeates the world Amirpour has created.  No image in the film is more chilling than a dump site—really an open air mass grave—holding the corpses of the disappeared.  The fact this place is known as Bad City suggests something very malevolent (possibly a government?) is weighing it down.

Ana Lily doesn’t go into how Bad City became bad—this is not an “origin story” in genre parlance—nor is there any depiction of the Iranian theocratic government, the Revolutionary Guard, or even the basij “fashion police.”   This is, after all, an allegory stripped to its bare essentials...and the pedestrian reality of these forces would detract from the poetic power of her film. 

But clearly we are in a totalitarian State as surreal in its existence as Orwell’s 1984, and the fact that these forces are unseen and not even mentioned adds to the creepiness.    Iranians and members of the worldwide Iranian Diaspora don’t need any of this spelled out...nor really do audiences less versed in Iranian recent history.   The pall is palpable.

Ana Lily shrewdly keeps her cast small.  Though played with subtle conviction, they are iconic symbols.  The GAMBLER is vainly trying to enjoy his senseless life of addiction and dissipation as best he can under impossibly oppressive circumstances; we feel his desperation at every turn. 

The Gambler’s female counterpart, the PROSTITUTE, shares his stark awareness of how totally impossible life is in Bad City—but feels even more oppressed by a culture that devalues women. 

The PERSIAN JAMES DEAN is a disaffected but polite young man who nevertheless hopes to be good in Bad City...against the odds.

The PIMP is a corrupt criminal crony...a part of the evil that strangles Bad City.

The GIRL, the vampira of this film—represents free-thinking trangressives—society’s artists.  Her room is filled with posters and music which she plays on her record player.  She’s given to spontaneous dancing and even wears a French low-necked horizontally striped jersey shirt that defined Left Bank artists for a century.  (Christof Waltz wears one in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes...but he’s a fake artist!)

The GAMBLER and PROSTITUTE represent those resigned to their fate; hope has died in them.  Unable or unwilling to leave Bad City, their only real escape is the morgue.

It is interesting when the symbol of  disaffected youth, the PERSIAN JAMES DEAN, and the GIRL, representing society’s artists, fall in love with one another and begin to think about their future as a couple and individuals.   They both realize the unspoken truth:  they must leave Bad City.   It’s not an easy decision... and not one without regrets...but soon they realize it is their only choice.  They leave...and in doing so...transmogrify into symbols of the great Iranian Diaspora.

Generally, disaffected youth and artists want to change society from within.  But what happens when a society, like Bad City, becomes so anathema and offers so little freedom and hope of a brighter future...that people have no choice but to leave?  What is to become of such a society?

That is the allegory that Ana Lily Amirpour is telling...her parents’ story...and she tells it well.

She is a talent to watch.

Jeff Shank is a film writer/producer/director, currently working on a feature documentary project about the Middle East,  Five Women.

Copyright 2014 by Jeffrey V. Shank