Keshavarz spills her family secrets in film
‘Persian Version’ looks at women’s resilience in difficult times
Maryam Keshavarz thought she was just sharing funny stories at a party.
About how as a little girl she smuggled Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” into Iran on a trip from her home in New York City to visit relatives there in the land of her parents.
About the strange sense of rootlessness that comes from being an Iranian American with your feet and heart in two different cultures.
About the jaw-dropping secret her mother and father had kept from Keshavarz and her seven brothers for years, a secret that explained so much about her relationship with her mother.
Just stories at a party. And then: “I didn’t know one of the people I was telling was a producer from Cinereach,” says Keshavarz. “They were like, ‘Oh my god, that’s so funny. You have to write that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I was kind of skirting the issue, and they kept stalking me. Then I said, ‘Well, I’ll write it if it can be a comedy.’ They’re like, ‘Great idea!’ ”
In a way, “The Persian Version,” now in theaters, was the perfect film for her to make, Keshavarz says.
“After 9/11, I left academia to go into cinema to tell a more nuanced version of stories from the Middle East,” she says. “I made a couple of films, I worked in TV. Then, when (former President Donald) Trump came into office, there was a lot of xenophobic rhetoric, a lot of ideas about the Muslim ban.
“I thought, ‘You know, if I think about it, I’ve never been represented in cinema or TV,’ ” Keshavarz says. “It’s something I’d always longed for as a child. It’s time to show being American has many different faces. I really want to tell an American story that showed our life here and also our history where we come from, and there had never been such a film made.”
Part of the fun in “The Persian Version” comes from the twists and turns of the relationship between daughter Leila (Layla Mohammadi) and mother Shireen (Niousha Noor).
The catalyst for the story — Leila, having just split from her wife, gets pregnant by a guy she meets at a Halloween party — is just one story taken directly from Keshavarz’s life.
“It’s more than semiautobiographical,” Keshavarz says, laughing, of the film that won the Audience Award and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival this year. “All of these things are true, I think they’re just in different orders.
“Like, I knew it would be a comedy, but in real life, my father died when I was 22. He had the heart transplant, just like in the film. I did meet the father of my daughter at a Halloween party. I have seven brothers, not eight like in the movie. I grew up with one bathroom. All those things are true.
“My mother’s story is 100% true, like almost to a T,” she says. “So (writing the screenplay) was really more about guiding the story. I think I realized as I was writing, it’s writing as a way to understand where we come from.
“Then I thought about the secret,” Keshavarz says about her mother’s lifechanging decision both in the film and real life. “And I realized, oh, there’s another writer in the story, and it’s not me. It’s my mother because she’s writing her own story.”
Making the film allowed Keshavarz to re-create the chapters of her life with different looks for each of the three women it focuses on at different times.
For Layla, the stand-in for Keshavarz, the bright colors of ’80s and ’90s sitcoms and music videos fill the screen. The film opens and closes with a Bollywood-esque dance number to “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” with the extended family in Iran.
For grandmother Mamanjoon (Bella Warda), there’s a kind of spaghetti Western quality to the chapter shot in a remote and dusty village when Shireen, married and a mother at 14, makes a decision that will change the course of the family.
For Shireen, who in the U.S. must act to save the family after her husband, Ali Reza (Bijan Daneshmand), grows ill, Keshavarz looked to mid-century Italian cinema. “My mother’s like the typical neo-realist film,” she says. “She was very much still holding the weight of the past with her.”
Given how fraught the relationship is between the mother and daughter in the film, one wonders how Keshavarz’s mother reacted when she saw their lives transposed to the screen.
“I only finished the film two days before Sundance, so no one saw it. Even me,” she says. “And then I couldn’t find her after the premiere. Went to the party, and 200 people are dancing and talking, and my mom, she’s very little, she comes up and grabs my face.
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, in front of everyone, she’s going to slap me!’ ” Keshavarz says, laughing. “And she says, ‘You did us justice.’ That was like the best review, because there’s so much in there that’s personal.”
To Keshavarz, “The Persian Version” offers different places for viewers to connect.
“I think the film is so much about resilience, particularly women’s resilience within difficult times,” she says. “You know, when they’re coming into (Iran), and she’s smuggling the tapes, it’s very monochromatic. It’s like the
oppression of the government. So when they go to the family home, and she emerges with a tape of ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun,’ it’s Technicolor, it’s so vibrant. I want to show no matter what you can’t extinguish joy.”
Iranian American audiences have seen in it pieces of their own stories, but Keshavarz believes no matter one’s heritage, the themes of family and generations and love and secrets will resonate.
“I always apologize to the audiences,” she says. “You’re about to spend the next two hours with my crazy family. But I think
that’s what’s so wonderful. They get submerged in another culture. An immigrant culture, maybe not like their own, but I think they probably will see themselves in some way reflected.
“Because we’ve all felt like outsiders at some point,” Keshavarz says. “Be it if we’re immigrants, if we’re gay, if we’re an artist, if we have different political views. Be it for whatever reason. So I hope that if you’re Iranian, you feel yourself reflected. If you’re not Iranian, you feel like, ‘Oh, these people aren’t that different from me, and they’re fun.’ ”