“I dreamed of being the Iranian Martin Scorsese,” confesses Leila (Layla Mohammadi), the lead character in “The Persian Version,” Maryam Keshavarz’s semi-autobiographical reverie about a rising Iranian American director and her tumultuous family life.
The film won the audience award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the second of Keshavarz’s movies to take that prize. (Her first, the 2011 queer romance “Circumstance,” launched her career — and got her banned from Iran.)
The movie opens at a costume party where Leila sports a niqab over a pink bikini, her cultural contradictions on brazen display. Leila, reeling from a split with her wife, Elena (Mia Foo), has a one-night stand with Maximillian (Tom Byrne) and becomes pregnant. To her conservative parents and eight brothers, Leila’s impending motherhood is yet another of her outrageous scandals.
Throughout, Keshavarz wields her Scorsese influences. There are disorienting time-jumps, abrupt edits and heavy narration paired with shots of Leila strutting through New York City. But Keshavarz samples other genres, too, from westerns and twee indies to go-for-broke slapstick. Maximillian, the would-be boyfriend, stammers adorably like he’s in a Hugh Grant rom-com and spends most of the film in drag. (He’s playing the lead in a production of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” at the time.)
The result is a personal film that feels oddly impersonal. The tonal clutter overwhelms Keshavarz’s genuinely interesting story. On the page, it might have sounded clever to have Leila hide under a gorilla mask when she bumps into her ex-wife at the grocery store. Onscreen, however, the gag feels contrived and distracting.
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