The Persian Version and the Art of Doing Too Much

Photo: Yiget Eken

Leila is too much. She’s too impulsive and defensive, pushing away her Iranian family as much as she complains they don’t accept her. As a guide for the audience in writer and director Maryam Keshavarz’s The Persian Version, Leila (Layla Mohammadi) is too much in another way — too often used to break the fourth wall and claim the audience’s attention and to reconcile hiccups in the film’s tone. Keshavarz’s script defines Leila by who and what she doesn’t want to be, and the result is that Leila sometimes feels like a tornado with an indiscriminate path, all outward tumult as she careers from one corner of the plot to another. But when The Persian Version shifts to the film-within-the-film Leila is writing and nudges her aside to tell her mother, Shireen’s, story, Keshavarz’s feature finds its performative core and explodes into emotional vibrancy.

Advertised as “based on a true story … sort of� and set in New Jersey, New York, and Iran, The Persian Version begins with Iranian American Leila rebelling against her parents Shireen (Niousha Noor) and Ali Reza’s (Bijan Daneshmand) expectations. Flashbacks to her childhood show Leila trying to balance typical Brooklyn-kid stuff like playing basketball and idolizing Michael Jackson with Iranian-daughter stuff like cooking for and cleaning up after her eight older brothers, and her relationship with Shireen only becomes more tense as Leila grows up. Frustrated with her second-class status within her own family and traumatized by feeling “too Iranian in America� and “too American in Iran,� Leila becomes a screenwriter and director to work through that duality — a decision that disappoints Shireen as much as Leila’s coming out as queer. Shireen has a secret of her own, though, which her mother (Bella Warda) describes to granddaughter Leila as a “scandal.� The Persian Version devotes the second half of its run time to untangling what happened to Shireen all those years ago.

Before then, though, there’s all of Leila’s issues to work through: her failed marriage to a woman who her parents never really let into the family, her new relationship with an actor (Tom Byrne) who was intended to be a one-night stand, and her fear about Ali Reza’s latest health scare. Every so often The Persian Version slips in some lightly subversive religious commentary, too, like Leila dressing up in a burka and bikini for a Halloween costume contest and complaining about how “Muslim women [are] supposed to be passive good girls.� Some of these early scenes are sharply conceived and amusingly laden with culture-clash details, like the smash cut connecting American and Iranian classrooms where Leila is respectively called “you smelly terrorist� and “you smelly imperialist,� and Shireen’s shock when her American guests show up on time for a party. (Iranians are notoriously, irredeemably late to social gatherings.) Mohammadi gives Leila enough spunk and liveliness to make her desire for more freedom sympathetic, even as her attitude toward Shireen becomes increasingly bratty and cruel. But The Persian Version’s first hour pulls both the actress and character in so many directions that the film starts feeling overstuffed.

This is Keshavarz’s first comedy after the erotic thriller Circumstance, about two young women falling in love in Iran’s conservative society, and her political drama Viper Club, which starred Susan Sarandon as a mother working to free her journalist son from his terrorist abductors. This third feature is more like a Gurinder Chadha coming-of-age joint crossed with Keshavarz’s own stereotype-challenging documentary Rangeh Eshgh (The Color of Love) with bits of Iranian American romantic comedies Shirin in Love and A Simple Wedding tossed in. There’s an unexpected love story and conversations about what love means, there are America-born kids chafing against foreign-born parents (amid a noticeably rushed and overly cutesy description of America and Iran as “former lovers� who got “a bitter divorce�), there’s a familiar arc of intergenerational acceptance. There’s also a trying-this-all-out quality to The Persian Version that suggests Keshavarz experimenting with how much she can get away with, like a joyous scene where Leila’s relatives in Iran launch into a choreographed dance routine set to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.�

But sometimes more is just more. A quirky Iranian grandma who advises Leila to have anal sex to maintain her virginity doesn’t really fit alongside a melancholy exploration of maternal mortality or an out-of-nowhere addiction story line. Keshavarz would probably say that these differing experiences reflect the bounty and possibility of life, and The Persian Version does implicitly make that argument through how the disparate Jamshidpours still care for one another despite their differences. But the film is also littered with loose ends — underdeveloped situations or underwritten characters — that feel like distractions from the portrait of Shireen that gives The Persian Version such purpose.

As the alternately judgmental, driven, and generous matriarch, Noor radiates a complex inner life and a commanding sense of self, even as she turns every immigrant-mom trope up to 11. (A withering-glare standoff between Shireen and cinema’s other most recent disapproving mom, Evelyn Wang, would probably end in a draw.) The Shireen role demands that Noor handle cultural specificities — unobjectionable ones, like teaching Leila how finely to chop herbs and spinach for the Iranian greens stew ghormeh sabzi, and the not-so-nice ones, like the sexism and homophobia Shireen uses as a weapon against Leila’s independence — without getting lost in them, and Noor does so with dynamic plasticity. Her tight nod hello and averted hug when Leila dares show up to Thanksgiving dinner with her girlfriend are as authentically felt as her determined air when explaining to fellow immigrants how they can buy their own homes; Noor wears the character’s imperfections and her ambitions like armor. Equally impactful is Kamand Shafieisabet, who plays the younger Shireen in a lengthy-but-engrossing flashback sequence to her adolescence in Iran.

The Persian Version is dedicated to both Keshavarz’s mother and daughter and “all the fierce Iranian women,� many of whom have for the last year been protesting as part of the Woman Life Freedom movement against the Iranian government’s constantly violent enforcement of social restrictions; Shireen’s spark and richness are a captivating illustration of the potential those women also hold inside them. Through her, The Persian Version tells an affecting and painful story about what womanhood demands and imagines, and about how someone can step forward into a life they sculpt for themselves at any age and in any place. When the film settles down enough to deliver that message, it’s the kind of confidently assured storytelling that makes you wish Keshavarz didn’t take so long getting there.