Critics reviews

The kind of film that is often referred to as "remarkably assured," and it is certainly that, and much more: it's exquisitely paced, worked-out, personal, and desperately funny. It's a movie you take to heart and want to urge on friends like an obscure small press book.

It's a mottled but auspicious debut and a singular statement of identity.

As described, Akhavan's film may sound like indie boilerplate; it's also world-wise and bitterly hilarious, as memories of the genesis and slow death of Shirin and Maxine's romance are refracted—Memento or Annie Hall style—against Shirin's ongoing spinout as a newly single woman.

The narrative is governed not by chronology but by seamless and smooth editing (by Sara Shaw). Adjacent shots softly tap rather than collide. The latter would have been a dysfunctional m.o. had it been incorporated in post, but here that collision occurs in the storyline itself, fueling the women's relationship until it goes up in flames.

Movies about 20-somethings wandering through Brooklyn, going to parties, having relationships, and then talking about it over lattes have become so cliched that a new "way in" to it doesn't even seem possible. But "Appropriate Behavior," even with its reliance on familiar types and tropes, feels like a unique vision of life seen through unique eyes.

Appropriate Behavior can make the mistake of arming its own characters with the power of analyzing their circumstances, instead of allowing the audience itself to connect the dots. The key element in a film like this is its ability to forge a credulous sense of spontaneity, which happens more often here toward the end.

The way Akhavan sketches sexual and subcultural identity is specific, subtle and suggestive (Shirin's eye makeup and Maxine's horn-rims each tell their own stories), no less so for being mostly a backdrop from which the majority-female ensemble cast can launch its one-liners.

Shirin's awkwardness may be fashionable, but it's not affected—she's genuinely scared to confess her fluid sexuality to her conservative Iranian parents, and doesn't remotely fit in at her family circle's bourgie Persian parties, any more than she suits the supposedly confidence-boosting bustier she's coaxed into wearing at a fancy undies store. For all the brazen charms of this warm, funny debut, though, its quieter moments signal a profundity that's really worth getting excited about.

For Shirin, everything is up in the air – and productively so, something her middle-class Iranian-American parents find hard to understand. Her eventual coming out in Farsi – "Mom, I'm a little bit gay" – is greeting by a sad, warm denial and, the film implies, Shirin moving on. Whereas Maxine has met her family's rejection with counter-rejection, we get the sense that Shirin will continue her balancing act that, with all its pratfalls and lack of closure, is both real and satisfying.

[Sundance NEXT] ultimately was not a bad place to be as it contained some of Sundance's most exciting films, starting with Appropriate Behavior, by New York-based Iranian American director Désirée Akhavian, who also plays the main role, obviously patterned on her own experience: this required both charisma and guts.