Spectral Bodies and Politics in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Ana Lily Amirpour (2014)
The lack of a heuristic journey in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is, even if conspicuous, oddly non-perturbing. There is hardly any evolution beyond the first third of the film; it stands by its archetypal Iranian (but really American) Spaghetti Western landscape. The premise, while seemingly whimsical, it is not quite so. The Girl, a skateboarding vampire in a chador (Sheila Vand) preys on bad men who prey on women in ghost-town Bad City. Arash, a rare decent working class man, provides for his heroin-addicted father until he seizes an opportunistic moment and becomes a dealer himself. The two meet and begin a strange, mostly mute relationship. The film's morality is unashamedly basic in its classic ambiguity and its visual references brazenly borrowed from American neo-noir sets. Bad City stands in for any monolithic Lego-like vision of a sad and bad city; think Sin City but more boring. Only, this city is seemingly comprised of merely its margins. Strange mass-graves and giant power-plants form the boundaries and labor economy of this city, beside the drug-dealing of course. In one short sequence at the beginning, giant machines see-saw across the screen, pecking at the bleak land like grotesque ravens or swinging like pendulums—either way, unequivocally Poe-esque in tribute. It is moments like these when the film is at its most discomfiting, and its directorial voice most piercing.
When The Girl meets an E-addled Arash staring at a lampost on on of her nightly skate-trips, she is flummoxed by his casual affection and child-like/drug-induced openness. She doesn't kill him. We're not quite sure why. Is she attracted to him? She's killed seemingly innocent homeless men before too, so why not him? They return to her room, with her pushing him along on her skateboard and dwell in its angsty space, listening to her American records. At this point, the theme of adolescence actually emerges. She allows herself to be held, caressed, and begins to tentatively trust. The Girl reveals herself to be just that.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Ana Lily Amirpour (2014)