http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/arts/sheila-vand-in-a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night.html 2014-11-21 01:35:29 Sheila Vand in ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’ A Persian-speaking, chador-wearing vampire is the main character in Ana Lily Amirpour’s “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” === By the time the vampire in the chador is skateboarding down a dark, desolate street, the director Shot for what seems like two well-spent dollars and change, this black-and-white movie opens with a male beauty, Arash (Arash Marandi), a gardener who’s been dolled up to resemble James Dean but looks more like a James Franco cousin. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans, his hair flopping prettily, Arash is posed in a desolate vista that brings to mind There are other types milling around the periphery, including a prostitute, Atti (Mozhan Marno), and a rich woman, a so-called princess, Shaydah (Rome Shadanloo). For the most part, however, Ms. Amirpour, in her feature directing debut, spends her time switching between Arash and the Girl, whose lives unfold on nearly parallel story tracks that — detail by detail, incident by incident — gradually converge. In one scene, the pimp seizes Arash’s Thunderbird to help satisfy Hossein’s debt; in another, the Girl watches as the pimp, hunkered down in the Thunderbird, threateningly shakes down the prostitute. Time and again, the relationships in the movie are defined by the exchange of money and the tremors and eruptions of violence that invariably accompany its circulation. Ms. Amirpour shot her movie in Bakersfield, Calif., and she has obviously watched her share of Sergio Leone westerns. She can fill a wide-screen frame, and if you don’t mind narrative repetition and passages in which nothing much happens, beyond pretty people staring at other pretty people, you may not mind that she has trouble filling this overlong movie, which comes in at 107 minutes, when 70 would have done nicely. Still, she gives you much to look at, including an image that looks like Madonna (it’s That complexity is suggested by the Girl’s look, which conjures up the “Papa Don’t Preach” music video in which Madonna wears a shirt and a pixie do borrowed from Jean Seberg. The video is a model of pop-culture intertextuality that makes a virtue out of its wide-ranging sampling, and much of its fun came from peeling its thickly layered influences. Something similar initially seems at work in “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” This is a movie that, after all, invites you to play a game of Name That Allusion, with Dean, Leone and so forth. Yet even as Ms. Amirpour draws heavily from various bodies of work with vampirelike hunger, she gives her influences new life by channeling them through other cultural forms, including her chador-cloaked vampire. The Girl isn’t actually alone: She has lots and lots of company.