Just Your Basic Iranian Vampire Spaghetti Western Art Movie

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.  Your basic Iranian vampire spaghetti western art movie.

The Boston Globe

A lot of my girlfriends think it’s glamorous being a famous Iranian actress, but they couldn’t be wronger.  Day after day, broiling under the hot sun on the back lots of We’re Not Making Movies Here, This is Actually an Auto Body Repair Shop Films.

First there’s make-up call at 5:30 a.m., and let me tell you the amount of Ghoul Crème Character Base #4 I have to wear to effectively portray your basic Iranian vampire victim doesn’t exactly help you keep cool.

Of course, I am multi-talented, capable of playing a spaghetti western heroine at the same time that I’m being bitten on the neck by Count Ahmad Dracula.  I only wish the Iranian cinema had developed a spaghetti western heart-throb, its Clint Eastwoodistan so to speak.  Instead, I must endure a succession of revolutionary “heroes” from central casting with Kaleh Pacheh (sheep brain and hooves) on their breath.  Awful offal, if you know what I mean.

The vampire spaghetti westerns are what I do to pay the rent, but what I really find fulfilling are the art movies, the ones that are not just movies but film, the kind that will be picked apart by undergraduate film societies around the world over espresso and black turtlenecks and berets and bullshit.  Those are the ones that will be remembered long after I am a washed-up, faded beauty, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, having gone through the wash, rinse and spin cycles of my chosen art form only to emerge a timeless icon after forty minutes on “fluff” with a Bounce fabric softener sheet in the critical whirl of the top half of my washer-dryer combo.

Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard.”

But who am I kidding?  I will be replaced by someone younger soon enough.  Some little she-camel who catches the eye of a hot young director, the way Cybill Shepherd broke up Peter Bogdanovich’s marriage on the set of The Last Picture Show.

Compare and contrast.

Then what will become of me?  Playing Wicked Witches of Western Civilization in Azeri-language propaganda films?  Demonstrating do-it-yourself centrifuges on Iranian Home Shopping Network?  Handing out appetizer in Tehran supermarkets?

Oh . . . my . . . Allah–that would be the ultimate disgrace.  But if it is inevitable I might as well get ready for it.

“Spring time is fava bean season–would you like to try some Kuku-Ye Baghali?”