Review: APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR Marks The Emergence Of A Major Comedic Talent

Imagine, if you will, that Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, and Louis CK got together to create a love child who had Lena Dunham as a nanny, and who grew up to become a bisexual Iranian-American woman. Such a person, if they also happened to have become a filmmaker, would probably make something like Appropriate Behavior, the wonderful debut feature from writer-director-actor Desiree Akhavan. 

Her film represents the emergence of a major comedic and filmmaking talent, who, on the evidence presented here, looks to have a fruitful career well worth watching ahead of her. And despite what I just wrote in my rather fanciful and admittedly absurd lede, Akhavan proves to be far more than the sum of her fairly obvious influences. She combines some autobiographical details with familiar - almost to the point of cliché - satirical jabs at Brooklyn-centered hipster pretentiousness, to get well beyond the clichés to deliver a frequently hilarious experience peppered with more poignant and heartfelt moments.

Appropriate Behavior is centered around the breakup of the film's protagonist Shirin (Akhavan) with her girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson). The first scene begins with the aftermath of this breakup, as Shirin moves her belongings out of the Park Slope apartment they shared together. Maxine refuses to keep a box containing a gift Shirin bought for her, forcing Shirin to take it with her. This leads to the film's first outrageously hilarious image: Shirin walking down the street with this rejected present - which just happens to be a strap-on dildo, which she swings in her hand as she walks down the street, to the quizzical stares of passersby.  This early scene is typical of the sort of bold humor that Appropriate Behavior exhibits throughout: an unabashedly frank portrayal of sexuality, executed with effortlessly confident flair.

The rest of the film unfolds as Shirin tries to deal with her heartbreak, sometimes by commiserating with her best friend Crystal (Halley Feiffer), but mostly by indulging in a series of sexual escapades with both men and women. She does this ostensibly to forget about Maxine, but there seems to also be a hidden agenda on Shirin's part to make Maxine jealous and somehow win her back in the process. This is evident by the fact that Shirin often deliberately goes to places where she knows she'll run into Maxine, which creates situations that are awkward, to say the least.

Shirin and Maxine's relationship is charted through flashbacks inserted between the present-day scenes, a structure borrowed from Woody Allen's Annie Hall, as Akhavan herself acknowledges. These flashback scenes are elegantly and skillfully placed at key points, often to contrast Shirin's current aimlessness with the security and joy that her relationship afforded her, even with the inherent problems and conflicts that led to its dissolution. For example, a failed one-night stand with a guy Shirin finds on OK Cupid segues into a much happier post-coital talk with Maxine.

Quite a large portion of Appropriate Behavior occurs between the sheets, as it were, and this is often where Akhavan's perceptive abilities shine most brightly. The sex scenes aren't played for eroticism or simply for laughs, but they capture the messiness and awkwardness of sexual encounters, the details of which are often elided in most other films. 

Perhaps the most impressive of these scenes is one where a swinger couple invites Shirin over to their house for a threesome. Far from being a passionate experience, it proves to be a painful and even an ironically lonely experience, as Shirin is unable to find a way to comfortably fit within this situation. This is all played out with very little dialogue, and mostly though the facial expressions and gestures of the actors. It's a scene that's funny, awkward, and quite sad all at the same time. Akhavan's skill as both performer and director is abundantly on display in this sequence.

And on the subject of not fitting in, this is where Shirin's (and Akhavan's) Persian background comes in. A big contributing factor in Shirin's breakup is due to the fact that she has not yet come out to her parents (Anh Duong and Hooman Majd) as bisexual. This is a difficult thing for Shirin to do, considering where her family comes from, a place where, as she points out, that people are stoned for being gay. Maxine accuses her of "playing the Persian card," that is, using her ethnicity to mask her lack of courage. The way this is handled in the film also is an indicator of Akhavan's astuteness in presenting the complexity of the situation she presents here, in which the decision to come out isn't a cut and dried issue, and that every individual, depending on their circumstance, must come to their own comfort level about this.

Akhavan ambitiously juggles several thematic balls in the air in her first feature: twenty-something aimlessness and angst; the absurdity of hipster posing; immigrant family expectations; the complex emotional navigations of bisexuality and coming out as such, especially to parents; recovering from romantic breakups. Akhavan does it all with admirable and impressive aplomb; she beautifully uses the skills she honed as the creator of the web series "The Slope" (about "homophobic lesbians") to create a feature-length work that is wonderfully acted and directed, finely nuanced on its subjects, and not to mention often laugh-out-loud hilarious. 

There will doubtless be much more to come from this talented woman; look no further than the current season of Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls to see more of Desiree Akhavan in action. Hopefully, with time, Akhavan will become as much a household name as Dunham is. And she'll richly deserve to be.