If life were fair, The Persian Version would become the new My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Filled with delightful cultural specificity and multiple wonderful stories, the movie is bursting at the seams with interesting rich stuff that’ll make you want to hang out at an Iranian family dinner. If I ever get a chance to party with Leila (Layla Mohammadi) or learn from Shireen (Niousha Noor), sign me up, over and over again.
The movie opens on a mid 2000s New York City Halloween, with Leila winning a Halloween contest for her take on the “burkini.” The youngest and only daughter of 9 kids from Shireen and Ali (Bijan Daneshmand), Leila is a mess, recently broken up with her girlfriend and hooking up with “drag queens” like a Hedwig NYC theater performer. This attitude toward life really clashes Leila with her mom, who took a much different approach to get to where she is today, happily married with a career and a big mostly happy family.
Writer/director Maryam Keshavarz is clearly writing from some version of personal experience here, and it shows. Similar to Polite Society, her Leila is a character I’ve never seen before onscreen: a progressive flawed modern Iranian American woman. That means Keshavarz’s movie is immediately in uncharted waters: we have no expectations or history with someone like Leila, so every scene with her is a new experience, completely captivating moment to moment with a razor sharp comedic edge. From just Leila we start to meet her parents and brothers, especially mom Shireen, an immigrant mom. The double pairing of mother daughter and immigrant/American brings about a host of complicated misunderstandings that get more interesting the deeper we go. This character depth forces Keshavarz to transform her movie a few times, as the perspective needs to shift and the audience needs to hear more about younger Shireen (Kamand Shafieisabet) and how she got to New Jersey. The time jumping causes some tonal whiplash, but you’re so invested into Shireen and Leila’s intertwined stories that you just go with it, knowing you’re going to go somewhere fascinating and fulfilling.
Maryam Keshavarz also struck gold with her relatively unknown leading ladies. Layla Mohammadi is captivating the minute the camera hits her face. You can’t take your eyes off her as she saunters through NYC to the beat of her own drum, appearing in complete control of her own crazy story. While Mohammadi is creating beautiful chaos, Niousha Noor and Kamand Shafieisabet do the opposite with Shireen. Both women give Shireen the best arc in the movie, transforming a timid scared woman into a bedrock of nobility and heroism like most immigrants hope for when they come to a new place. Noor and Mohammadi play off each other extremely well, creating one of the great mother daughter relationships I’ve ever seen committed to film.
At this point I’m a broken record, but I have to say it again. Roger Ebert got it right, when he said the movies are a machine that generates empathy. For all those Iranian immigrants who never saw themselves onscreen before in the United States, The Persian Version is here to see you, and show how awesome you are. I would love to be invited to family dinner: bring on the Ranginak and Koresh!