It’s always easier to blame our problems on childhood trauma — or in this case, mommy issues. This is the revelation that a young Iranian-American woman comes to in Maryam Keshavarz’s The Persian Version. Casting blame is easier perhaps, than coming to the inevitable conclusion most women come to in their lives: That their mothers were women long before domesticity consumed them. Both an adult coming-of-age story of an aspiring filmmaker and an examination of three generations of women, this “version” doesn’t patronize motherhood, but rather reveals its strengths.
Leila (Layla Mohammadi) is a typical neurotic 20-something writer living in New York. Typical in the way she boasts her rebelliousness, and her indifference to following the rules of being an immigrant daughter to a Muslim family. She represents everything antithetical to marital values, and everything her mother Shireen (Niousha Noor) has worked for, i.e., maintaining the nuclear family. For one, she’s gay, and more specifically, a gay woman recovering from a brutal lesbian divorce. But other than this, she is the perfect daughter. She perfects the family recipes, looks after her grandmother (Bella Warda) and lives a relatively healthy life aside from her one fatal homosexual flaw. So why is it that her mother seems to resent Leila so much? This is explored as she works on a screenplay detailing her life and her estranged relationship with Shireen, which launches her investigation of a family scandal that brings out the parallels between the two.
As our protagonist helps narrate the story of how her parents immigrated to Brooklyn, the film’s pacing and tone start to unravel, sometimes abruptly. This kind of nonlinearity works when pieces of Leila’s family history are blended into the parallels of her current life, especially when it happens that she becomes pregnant, where we really see the mirrored personalities of her and her mother just before their maternity. It gets a bit clunky when these transitions become less seamless, and the flashbacks become less consistent with each other. Nonetheless, a teenage Shireen (Kamand Shafieisabet) becomes the narrator as she takes us to ‘60s Iran and delivers what is certainly the heart of the film in a powerful monologue about narrating her own story (literally, as she is speaking to the audience) under the guise of domesticity.
In the present day, Leila is dealing with her own personal exploration as she grapples with the reality of being pregnant, being gay and eventually becoming a mother herself. Her decision to keep her baby is strange considering there is never a moment in her past that would suggest her desire for motherhood, but it is heavily implied that the birth of her daughter will rewrite the wrongs of Shireen’s past and somehow mend their relationship. This brings up an interesting dilemma which deals with the guilt Leila carries on behalf of her mother and the resolution to their tension, which is essentially to have her give in to societal pressure to take on a more traditional role. Shireen’s apology to her daughter comes only after she has embraced conventional femininity, yet after spending so much time investigating each of their traumas, this seems to tie up loose ends too easily.
While a little muddled, The Persian Version presents the real discomfort of being a woman, and the sacrifices made so common by our mothers. It’s narrated with the anticipation of being on the brink of the next chapter in life, while still looking back and honoring the courage that it takes not to thrive in spite of motherhood, but because of it.
Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
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