The Brooklyn Rail

In the opening scene of Maryam Keshavarz’s The Persian Version (2023), Leila (Layla Mohammadi) brazenly parades across the Brooklyn Bridge donning a “burkini,” a glitter-studded blue niqab paired with pink bikini bottoms, en route to a Halloween party. In its cheeky form, the dramedy addresses Iranian immigrant stereotypes, concurrently reinforcing and dispelling certain ones. The narrative unfolds a tale spanning three generations of Iranian women, exploring the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships and shedding light on the disproportionate burdens mothers bear.

The film is characterized by its chaotic, non-linear structure, traversing locations from Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood to rural Iran, as well as various decades and different narrators, in a challenge to traditional notions of narrative authority and agency. But not without some confusion and distraction.

A dramatized interpretation of Keshavarz’s Iranian American life, The Persian Version traces the journey of a clashing mother-daughter duo: Leila, a struggling queer writer who gets accidentally pregnant, and Shireen (Niousha Noor), a multi-tasking Iranian-born mother of nine with conservative leanings who is harboring a family secret.

In a Mean Girls-esque tone, Leila narrates the first half of the film with dramatic, cliché statements, like “my mother was an enigma … she held her cards tight with everything, except her criticism of me,” and her self-description of being “too Iranian in America, too American in Iran.” She characterizes the dichotomy between her and her mother as “if she’s old world, I’m new world.” Leila breaks the fourth wall several times, staring into the camera and halting the scene for soliloquies, providing satirical commentary and background information. Through its non-linear format, the film is able to interweave the present day with recent flashbacks and childhood memories.

Leila’s narration includes a series of acrimonious and defensive exchanges between the mother and daughter, particularly regarding Leila’s queerness, success, and career. A recent flashback showcases the duo attending the New York Film Festival screening of Circumstance (2011), Keshavarz’s drama exploring queerness in modern Iran. In the theater, Shireen tells Leila, “you do this to hurt me.” The tough love Shireen expresses to Leila is not replicated to her eight brothers or their wives, who Shireen appears to approve, celebrate, and support.

At one point, Leila says “I’m nothing like my mother,” but the two share similar practices of stubbornness, silence, and a reluctance to apologize. They also go through similar actions in the city, just thirty years apart. After Shireen’s husband Ali Reza (Bijan Daneshmand) fell ill and could no longer work, she wandered through Manhattan one night, seeking a sign and a job to cover the mounting hospital bills and living costs of nine children. Three decades later, Leila stumbles through the city binge-eating after she finds out a life-changing circumstance—that she’s pregnant from a one-night stand from her burkini Halloween evening. The women walk over the Brooklyn Bridge several times, a symbolic nod to bridging their relationship, the gaps between their two cultures, and the similarities they share with one another despite their belief in being opposites.

When Leila’s father gets admitted to the hospital for a heart transplant, Shireen gathers her sons to sit at his bedside, curtly instructing her only daughter, Leila, to return home and attend to her grandmother, Mamanjoon (Bella Warda), instead. Leila and her grandmother share a more unguarded and intimate connection, oftentimes dancing, watching television, and sharing family history and secrets in Persian, specifically Shirazi Persian. Mamanjoon embodies the archetype of an old, humorous matriarch who tells embellished tales and makes inappropriate jokes. Lacking a filter, Mamanjoon alludes to Shireen’s life-altering secret in an attempt to help Leila understand her mother better.

The secret is a pivotal plot point, initiating a shift in the narrator and a reversal of chronology. Keshavarz produced the film in a non-linear way, drawing from her own life experience “when the secret was revealed, everything I thought I knew about myself became appended, it all changed,” she told the Brooklyn Rail. Shireen takes charge of unveiling the secret through her detailed storytelling, a narrative decision driven by Keshavarz’s desire to empower her character, “I had to give her equal weight and equal narrative possibility,” she explained. Shireen, like her daughter, breaks the fourth wall and narrates her story as a married teen in the rural Iranian countryside.

Shireen’s secret lays bare the raw and challenging realities of pregnancy and motherhood. A mere teenager at the time, young Shireen (Kamand Shafieisabet) moves with her husband to a rural village in Iran, where they welcome their first child. At times, the new narration and switch to young actors playing Shireen, Mamanjoon (Sachli Gholamalizad), and Ali Reza (Shervin Alenabi) in their youth feels like an entirely different movie, one far away from the sparring Leila-Shireen plot line.

The following year, while pregnant once more and struggling to keep up with her one-year-old baby, Shireen discovers her husband’s affair and is heartbroken. Days later, in the hospital, she gives birth to a stillborn. Shireen is not granted any time to grieve the loss of her first daughter, Arezoo, before her husband quickly hands her his mistress’ child to feed since his mother died in childbirth. Showcasing her extraordinary strength and resilience, Shireen raises the boy, Vahid, as one of her own, wearing a mask for decades and never sharing the secret with her children. As a narrator, Shireen reclaims her story, sharing that the silence and discomfort she felt when she finally had a healthy baby girl, Leila, contributed to their tense relationship.

At the end of the film, Leila goes into labor in a hospital room chaotically filled with her mother, brothers, and the baby's father. Keshavarz removes the space between Shireen and Leila when the doctor yells the same triggering comment that was said to Shireen moments before she birthed her stillborn, “your hips are too narrow!” Holding her mom’s hand, Leila pushes out a healthy baby girl. She names her Arezoo.

Keshavarz’s The Persian Version bites off more than it can fully chew, but that’s not to say there aren’t moments to enjoy and appreciate. At just under two hours, the film is at times packed and overstimulating with an assortment of elements: a rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” with Persian lyrics, sporadic animation and overwrite text, archival videos, a seemingly disjointed sub-film during Shireen’s narration, scenes portraying immigrant family meals, jokes about queer relationships, family fights in Persian and English, and a fixation on weddings, all pulling the film in different directions and leaving the viewer scattered but entertained. This distracted and fragmented approach only skims the surface of the film’s major themes, resulting in a sense of unfulfillment for the viewer.

“I wanted to take you on a crazy roller coaster of two hours with me,” Keshavarz told the Brooklyn Rail, detailing why she created the film in this style. And that she does!