The Persian Version

Maryam Keshavarz's "The Persian Version" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023 and won two prizes, the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It opened in American cinemas on October 20, 2023, and turns three this week. We look at the film through three critics who have seen it and who reach three different verdicts.

First the story, as the three describe it. Leila is an Iranian American filmmaker in New York, the only daughter in a family with eight sons. She has recently divorced her wife. One night she walks to a Halloween party in a burkini, surfboard in hand, and meets Max, a Broadway actor still in his costume from "Hedwig and the Angry Inch". She becomes pregnant that night. At the same time her father, Ali Reza, goes into hospital for a heart transplant. Her mother, Shireen, has been estranged from her for years, since the Thanksgiving when Leila brought her wife home and was thrown out. To make peace, Leila has to learn her mother's past. Her grandmother, Mamanjoon, gives her the thread, and the film goes back to Iran, to the day thirteen-year-old Shireen was married to twenty-two-year-old Ali Reza and sent to the remote village where he worked as a doctor.

The first angle: a film about a mother and a daughter. Aviva Dove-Viebahn, writing in Ms. Magazine, is the warmest of the three. She finds the film uplifting and engrossing and writes that it balances humor and grief. In her view Keshavarz takes the familiar story of the immigrant who struggles and prevails and turns it into a film about the bond between mother and daughter, the gap between two cultures and each person's claim to her own story. She also praises the film's playfulness with narrative form and sees it as serving that theme. Midway through the flashback the teenage Shireen takes over as narrator, and the audience sees her choices through her own eyes. Dove-Viebahn notes that the film draws on Keshavarz's own life, a family with seven brothers and immigrant parents in 1980s New York. The Iran section, she writes, shows child marriage and a world in which divorce could ruin a woman's life.

The second angle: this is Shireen's story. Valerie Complex of Deadline stands in the middle. She writes that the characters often speak to the camera and that title cards help the viewer keep track. In her view Leila becomes a spectator in her own life, because the film is really the story of Shireen, from teenage bride in Iran to successful real estate agent in New York. That shift makes the film feel more like an anthology than one whole. Complex understands why it is built this way but does not find the execution graceful, and she questions setting the main character aside for half an hour. At the end she is not sure mother and daughter truly understand each other. Even so, she compares the film to Lulu Wang's "The Farewell" and finds its value in showing the lives of Iranian women. At a time of unrest in Iran, she writes, the film tells those women, "We see you, and your voices are heard."

The third angle: two films that never become one. Marya E. Gates of The Playlist is the hardest on the film and gives it a C. She writes that the flashbacks are cut in haphazardly, and that their effect is to suggest a stronger film would have stayed with Shireen alone. In her view Leila's present-day scenes are underwritten, her exchange with her ex-wife is clumsy, there is no chemistry between Leila and Max, and the pregnancy never works as a frame for the story. Gates also points to a confused timeline and asks why the father is still in hospital through the whole of Leila's pregnancy. She finds the ending rushed, as it swings between heartfelt drama and slapstick. Yet she also writes that the ending keeps its force, and she credits that to Niousha Noor's finely detailed performance as Shireen.

On one thing the three agree. The heart of the film is Shireen and the two actresses who play her, Niousha Noor and Kamand Shafieisabet as her younger self. All three single out the moment when the teenage Shireen takes the telling away from her daughter and speaks for herself. Where they differ is on whether joining the mother's story to the comedy of the daughter's life works. The wider critical tally shows the same split. On Rotten Tomatoes 84 percent of reviews are positive, and the Metacritic average is 61 out of 100.

For our readers the film is of interest in one more way. In this same issue we write about Novid Parsi, who asks what right a son has to tell his mother's story. On the evidence of these three reviews, Keshavarz hands the story back to the mother herself halfway through the film.

The film runs 107 minutes, in English and Persian, and is rated R in the United States.