Franz Kafkas novels and stories were all too complex, too ambigious and without a clear message to be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster. Even the French nouvelle vague, Italian neorealism nor the German expressionist cinema had any ambitions to use Kafkas literature as a movie plot (With the exception of Orson Welles’ version of “The Trial”). But now comes a movie from a team of Iranian ex-pats, who produced an unofficial tribute to Kafkas obscure world.
The first Iranian Vampire Western ever made, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut basks in the sheer pleasure of pulp. A joyful mash-up of genre, archetype, and iconography, its prolific influences span spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, horror films, and the Iranian New Wave.
“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” is not a blockbuster, but it is a great and intelligent, amazingly complex story with a hidden political message.
The girl of Ana Lily Amirpour’s movie is not like other girls. She is, for one thing, a vampire, but she’s not like other vampires, either. She wears a hijab and prowls the fictional Iranian town called Bad City (actually Bakersfield, Calif.). Her inevitable feeding seems to come as much from personal needs as it does a sense of social justice: she feeds on the bad guys and spares the ones that she seems to regard as good or at least having potential. She is lonely and almost entirely silent. Her best friend is her record collection.
