Director tries to work out her mommy issues onscreen
“The Persian Version” is the work of a confident filmmaker, and the opening minutes ooze with the charm of someone absolutely sure that everything she’s saying is worth hearing and everything she’s showing is worth seeing.
But by the middle, what seemed like confidence reveals itself as a bad combination of presumption and naivete. Writer-director Maryam Keshavarz clearly believed we’d willingly follow her down every alley and rabbit hole of plot and assumed we’d be as interested in her family as she was. But she didn’t make the family interesting and didn’t fashion her past experiences into a compelling story.
It took Steven Spielberg 50 years to work up the nerve to make a wonder-of-me movie about his filmmaking origins, “The Fabelmans.” Keshavarz (“Circumstance”) gets there with this, her second narrative.
Yet curiously, the movie is much better when it concentrates on Keshavarz’s filmmaking doppelganger, Leila (Layla Mohammadi). Where it falls down — lost in clashing impulses of guilt, admiration, hatred and love — is when Keshavarz splits her focus and makes Leila’s stern, unloving mother (Niousha Noor) an equal part of the narrative.
It starts off light. The opening credits tell us that we’re seeing a true story, “sort of,” and next we meet Leila, a New York-born Iranian American woman, on her way to a costume party, dressed in a burkini.
Within minutes, she’s in bed with a man she has just met, though we’re told that this move is atypical for her: Leila usually identifies as a lesbian, and a flashback shows her mother throwing her out of the family’s Thanksgiving dinner for bringing her girlfriend.
Perhaps these first 10 minutes of “The Persian Version” should have been a warning: A movie about a lesbian that begins with her in bed with a man could be accused of having a slapdash approach to storytelling. But at this point, the film merely seems freewheeling, and Leila — a young woman beginning her career as a filmmaker — is an engaging, forthright character.
Things start to go wrong when Keshavarz shifts gears to tell the story of Leila’s mother. The problem is that while Keshavarz has lots of thoughts about this woman, she doesn’t know what she really thinks. She is working it out onscreen as one might while talking out loud to a therapist: On the one hand, Mom was unsmiling and undermining and, in general, awful to her. On the other hand, Mom was admirable and enterprising and held the family together.
So we get all this stuff: Mom looking for work. Mom starting a real estate business. Mom going to a movie that Leila made and not liking it. If Keshavarz were in a room with you, talking about her own mother in this way, you’d try to change the subject. If you were a therapist, you’d fall asleep.
“The Persian Version” tries to pivot and fashion itself as a celebration of women’s strength across the generations, but it’s transparently something else — a daughter’s attempt to come to terms with a problematic mother. And it’s an effort in which there can be no suspense because Keshavarz’s strenuous effort to whitewash mom tells us that the movie, and the relationship, can only resolve in one way.
Two-thirds of the way in, the movie goes off the rails when Keshavarz launches into an endless flashback to Mom’s childhood. By then, “The Persian Version” is irretrievably gone.