Review: 'The Persian Version' Celebrates Family and its Many Secrets

Iranian-American filmmaker Maryam Keshavarz has made movies about Iranian women before, both in documentary and narrative feature form; her last feature, about a pair of female lovers in Tehran, got her banned from Iran.

But her new opus, "The Persian Version," should open doors, not get them slammed shut on her. Celebrating family and interrogating its layers of complication, its frictions, and its secrets, the film – which Keshavarz calls "semi-autobiographical" – is a masterfully measured work that balances comedy and drama, even as its main character, Leila (Layla Mohammadi) walks a line between two very different cultures: Iran, the land where her parents and two oldest brothers were born, and the America, where she grew up, came out, got married to another woman, got divorced... and now, still reeling from the end of her marriage, gets pregnant from a one-night fling with Maximillian (Tom Byrne), an actor who's starring in (what else?) a Broadway production of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch."

The film flashes back and forth between the past and the present, detailing Maryam's frustrations with her mother, Shireen (Niousha Noor), her sense that she – the lone daughter in a brood of nine children – has gotten short shrift when it comes to maternal love, and, eventually, delving into the life history that's made her mother into such a (Leila's word) enigma. The shocks come as quickly as the laughs as the film unspools a tale of life in a vastly different culture, and shows what it costs to chart one's own course, especially as a woman in a deeply patriarchal, and deeply religious, society.

Leila's band of brothers don't get much screen time, but when they do they are a riot, and exactly the mob of siblings you would want to have your back. (One of them – the one closest to Leila – even seems as though he might be gay, though that's never out and out specified.) On the other side of the generational divide, Leila's grandmother Mamanjoon (Bella Warda, wonderful in the role) is a fount of wisdom, compassion, lore, and even sexual advice.

The film moves quickly and nimbly, saturated with the kind of grace and charm that only seldom comes across in movies, let along movies with LGBTQ+ themes. (Alice Wu's "Saving Face" from 2004 might be the last time I saw a film with a lesbian central character that felt so effortlessly delightful.) Sprinkled with moments of fourth-wall breaking and the occasional splash of magical realism (particularly when "Imam Zaman," a kind of family patron saint, shows up to save the day), "The Persian Version" is the only version of itself it needs to be.

"The Persian Version" plays in theaters starting Oct. 20.