“The Persian Version” Review
Focusing on an Iranian-American family in the New York metropolitan area, “The Persian Version” showcases the tumultuous and endearing story of how beautiful dysfunction is.
Going into “The Persian Version”, I was expecting an irreverent comedy that focused on a young woman’s struggles with her family. What I got was so much more. “The Persian Version” is an ambitious, multigenerational story that seeks to make you laugh and cry and accomplishes both.
Set over several decades, the primary focus of the film is on Leila Jamshidpour (Layla Mohammadi), an Iranian-American filmmaker from Brooklyn who feels torn to shreds between everything in her life. She’s always felt too Iranian for America and too American for Iran and has to deal with many people in her life, especially her mother Shireen (Niousha Noor), not understanding her creative ambitions and her sexuality. Things are made further complicated when Leila finds out that she’s pregnant from a one-night stand with an actor (Tom Byrne) and decides to keep the baby. As she deals with all of the stress in her life, Leila begins looking into her family’s past in Iran and discovers just how alike she and her mother are.
Written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz, this story feels so personal to the Iranian-American filmmaker and it results in a family epic that manages to combine humor and drama quite well. Layla Mohammadi’s performance is full of life as she is constantly juggling a million things at once in her career and her personal life and that’s before she becomes pregnant.
Trying to understand your parents is a pretty tough task regardless of your relationship with them. However, that’s the task that Leila has undertaken in the film. Despite not having a great relationship with her mother, Leila’s experience as a soon-to-be-parent strikes her curiosity as to why her parents decided to leave Iran and the secrets that are within her family. Both Leila and Shireen are torn between tradition and modernity while also trying to understand each other which is pretty hard to do. Niousha Noor’s performance is astounding as she creates this persona of strength while also having a vulnerable side that she declines to share.
The film’s story has a massive range in its timeline. While primarily set in the 2010s, we not only see various parts of Leila’s childhood in the 1980s and 90s but we also see the early years of Shireen (Kamand Shafieisabet) and her marriage to Leila’s father Ali Reza (Shervin Alenabi). Through this multigenerational family arc, Leila is able to examine where she comes from and how these origins can shape our destiny.
Keshavarz’s script has quite a strong balance of humor and drama with this family unit at its center. The chemistry with Leila, her parents and her many siblings is so believable as a loving group that is also struggling with their own egos and personal dramas.
While “The Persian Version” is a good film that I think fans of family dramedies will be happy with, the film’s editing is what holds it back. I admire its ambition but the way it’s structured can make the film’s brisk 107 minute runtime drag at times. Certain sequences could have been cut up more with the other timelines to showcase just how the elements of the past can be repeated in the future. However, by the film’s end, all of what has been seen comes together in a finale that is so emotionally resonant.
The power of “The Persian Version” is with its writing and performances and those excel to make the film a wonderful experience that shows how, no matter where you come from, the struggles of family can be beautiful and exhausting all at once.
