Monday, August 04, 2014

The Night Is Dark And Full of Terrors

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Watching the Iranian vampire flick A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night it doesn't take much time at all for you to realize that you're in the hands of an accomplished iconographer with director Ana Lily Amirpour. The slapping together of seemingly random bits and pieces - disco balls and skateboards, pussycats and smokestacks oh my - into an entirely new world, a micro-genesis all its own and immediately I'm-calling-it-now unforgettable... this is the stuff we'll be doodling in our cyber-notebooks in our old-folks-homes of the future when we wake up from weird dreams remembering that time when, oh yeah, two figures walked ghost-like down a street, mirror images, hunter and hunted, prey and the preyed upon.  Girl riffs on Joss Whedon's original Buffy edict of empowering the seemingly small and fragile female in a world of deepest darkest alleyways, but flips it over and goes all Eraserhead on its ass. Nothing so simple or sane as empowerment's going on here.

What a world, what a world. Pimps painted with Arabic swooshes spilling sad ladies of the night out side-doors, and the hiss that succeeds the piercing of earlobes echoing in cramped claustrophobic but astonishingly bright interior spaces - teeth terrible teeth that glow and pulse in the dark. But as scary as these streets and clapboard houses may be are I never stopped wanting to visit them either - to take pills and dance in slow motion and hop in my cool car and race amongst the thrumming oil-derricks, pumping the earth apart like heartbeats stretching up and aching against the skin of our throats, steady steady steady...

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night screened as part of New York's wonderful Rooftop Films series, which you can find out more about right here. They brighten up the city's night skies every Summer with can't miss movie-going events.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for pointing this one out.

Glenn said...

I am so glad you liked this. Still probably my favourite film of the year (that will never actually get released, SIGH). The way she flips the iconography of the stifling Iranian sexism into something to be feared is just so genius and well done. The black and white totally necessary and way more than just a cool style choice. So many genres and styles blended into one another and yet they all work. Fantastic.