Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/02/22

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, October 2, 2022

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

Cast: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Mozhan Marnò, Dominic Rains, Rome Shadanloo, Milad Eghbali, Reza Sixo Safai, Masuka the Cat. Screenplay: Ana Lily Amirpour. Cinematography: Lyle Vincent. Production design: Sergio De La Vega. Film editing: Alex O’Flinn. Music: Bei Ru.

Girls probably shouldn’t walk home alone at night unless they’re chador-wearing vampires who ride skateboards. That seems to be the major point made by Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home at Night. The Girl (Sheila Vand) has no name that we know of, and she doesn’t seem to go out in the daytime, but we learn that she’s a vampire when she bites off the finger of and then desanguinates Saeed (Dominic Rains), a sleaze, a pusher, and a pimp. Saeed has earlier confiscated a 1957 Ford Thunderbird from Arash (Arash Marandi) as payment for debts he incurred trying to support his junkie father, Hossein (Marshall Manesh). Arash’s attempt to retrieve his car brings him into contact with the Girl. What little suspense the film generates lies in how the relationship between Arash and the Girl will progress. Will he become her victim, as Saeed, a homeless man, and eventually Arash’s father do? Or will they find some other way of connecting? More droll than scary, A Girl Walks Home at Night takes place in Iran’s imaginary Bad City, which seems a lot like Southern California except that everyone speaks Persian and it’s more thinly populated. We meet some other characters in the course of the film, including a streetwalker and an urchin, but the most memorable is probably the cat Arash adopts, which eventually winds up with the Girl, to Arash’s surprise. Almost everything about this film, Amirpour’s first feature, defies summary, except to note that it’s extraordinarily original, confidently conceived and directed, sometimes very funny, and its black-and-white cinematography is often quite beautiful.