The coming – out story of a bisexual American / Iranian girl, sounds like a emotionally- challenging watch, rife with political and sexual arguments. But, Appropriate Behavior plays out more like a mash-up between Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and an episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls than a serious commentary on Middle-Eastern sexual repression.
In her debut feature film, Desiree Akhavan isn’t trying to speak out for any minority – she is just struggling with the universal question, in the words of her protagonist Shirin “How do people meet, agree they like each other, and then keep on liking each other?”
Just like Annie Hall, the movie starts at the end, the couple have broken up. Shirin (writer / director Akhavan) is seen leaving her girlfriend Maxine’s plush Park Slope apartment with little more than a strap on dildo in her hand. While Maxine (Rebecca Henderson) gets busy with a scissors, cutting up a colourful array of lace panties she gifted her former lover.
The rest of the movie moves through non-chronological vignettes of their relationship including a bookstore scene (a direct homage to Annie Hall), and in flashbacks you can see the relationship slowly pull apart.
Sure there is the underlying tension that Shirin has not come out to her conservative Persian parents while Maxine is fully comfortable with her status as a lesbian. But this is really a backdrop to a coming-of-age movie, a sexually frank portrait of something most people go through in their 20s – the disintegration of a serious relationship — and its long, bitter aftermath. Some critics have remarked that this movie lacks depth; it’s too tentative about digging into sexual and cultural themes.
Speaking at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, Akhavan argues this, explaining: “None of the scenes in the film were about battling misconceptions or making political statements. The story is about one woman who happens to be bisexual and Iranian – I never even entertained the idea that I would be representing anyone but myself.”
Rather than a cop-out, the lack of melodrama, and the way in which Shirin’s parents should be choose to ignore the obvious nature of their daughter’s friendship with Maxine rings true in the movie. The fact that they opt to ignore something that is staring them in the face is poignant – they don’t want to deal with it.
“When you’ve a kid who comes out you have two options, you can either disown them or you have to deal,” explains Akhavan, who was born and raised in New York to Iranian immigrants.
“With me it’s extra difficult because not only am I the only gay person any of us know in our community, I’m also a film maker who makes incredibly personal work, and I’ve really dragged them through the mud. I hope that my work is respectful because I really have so much love for them. I was making The Slope and they were upset at me for being gay, but the more prestige The Slope got the more they were able to see this wasn’t the end of my life.”
The Slope, is a queer-cult web series about “superficial, homophobic lesbians” in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood which first gained Akhavan fame. “I don’t know what it would be like to have a child that does the things that I do to my parents so that’s rough, and I have to give it to them, they’re very special people.” So the process of coming out is an undertone to the main storyline of being a confused, directionless, 20-somehing year old. “Shirin is the younger, slightly immature incarnation of some fears I have about myself, but I’d like to think that she was more a look at things I had observed about myself and tried to change after I turned 25,” explains Akhavan.
For the viewer, these fears are personified in bratty but likeable Brooklynite Shirin, making her way through a break up one glass of “the cheapest red that you have” at a time. Like Girls (which Desiree has bagged a role in for season 4) the sex scenes ring true. As Shirin and Maxine’s relationship dwindles, so does their sex life. During an attempt at role-play, Maxine’s lack of enthusiasm is portrayed in her choice of character – a tax auditor coming to check on a sexy business owner’s accounts. But she can’t keep up the lackluster presence and resorts to reading a book instead. Post break-up, diving into her re-bound period, Shirin has a toe-curling awkward threesome encounter which is brilliantly executed, relying on body language cues and telling expressions rather than soul-searching dialogue or cheap laughs.
“In movies, everything is either effortless and sexy and perfect and you’re swept up in the romance, or it’s incredibly awkward and horrible and clunky,” explains Akhavan. “I really wanted to communicate something new at every moment, to never just have fucking for the sake of fucking, to subtly communicate power shifts and emotional shifts throughout the encounter. I also just wanted to show the dynamic changing between the characters in the scene, and being able to pinpoint where that shift happens, from something that everyone’s on board for and excited for to suddenly, something’s changed and no one’s said anything, but it’s happened, so subtly that it’s almost intangible.”
These realistic sex scenes, the self-involved protagonist and a script loaded with unforgettable one-liners means Akhavan can’t escape being compared to Lena Dunham. But this is less the result of unoriginality on Akhavan’s part than Dunham’s ownership of that particular style, much as any protagonist who is a neurotic, lovelorn middle-aged New York intellectual will draw comparisons to Woody Allen.
Akhavan, however, is deeply aware of being ‘the next Lena Dunham.’ “There’s so many indie films made in New York with a ‘girl in the city’ theme and people are so sick of that tired narrative, ‘not another girl from Brooklyn. I don’t think it’s tired, I think every story, if it’s done well, can be beautiful…. obviously, I made this tired narrative movie. But if Sundance hadn’t seen the potential in this film, nobody would have watched it.”
To sum it up – potential is the perfect word to describe this movie, it’s funny and fresh, an exciting introduction to a new talent in the film world, but you get the feeling her better work is yet to come.
3/5 stars
Niamh Byrne
@niamhwrites
Screening at
Sydney Film Festival
