Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+

The Persian Version had me at the start, and then it lost me almost completely, and then it pulled me back in again. It was kind of an emotional roller coaster, from fun to total confusion to moving warmth.

I’m not sure this movie intended to take me on this particular journey. It seems much more intent on telling the lighthearted story of how an estranged mother and daughter found a way to connect, with mixed results. It can’t seem to decide what character’s point of view it’s taking, being mostly narrated by the young but grown daughter, one of nine children, until suddenly, in a flashback to the mother’s youth, the young Shireen (Kamand Shafieisabet) suddenly yells out that she wants to be the narrator of her own story.

This is maybe halfway through the movie, and Shireen proceeds to tell (and show) us how she and her husband made their way from an incredibly remote village in Iran to the United States in the late sixties. This goes on for quite some time, during which I realized I had no clue where this movie was going. It does eventually come to a pivotal point, which connects to Shireen’s relationship with her now-grown daughter, Leila (Layla Mohammadi).

This involves a pretty major revelation, but when the narrative cuts back to Leila’s point of view, there is no indication whatsoever as to whether they have any subsantive discussion about it. A bit later, at the wedding of one of her countless brothers, Leila makes a reference to it to Shireen, and it’s clear Shireen knows she knows. It feels like there was a lot of important stuff there in the middle that just got skipped over. What’s more, Leila is an aspiring writer and filmmaker, and the flashback to Shireen’s childhood is presented as an account written by Leila, until Shireen takes over the narration. Who is actually telling this story is frustratingly never made clear.

On the upside, the undeniable onscreen charisma of both of these women makes up for a lot. And to be clear, it does have to make up for a lot—Shafieisabet and Mohammadi are both great, but the acting of some of the supporting characters is at times abysmal. Most of the young men playing Leila’s brothers, who are so numerous that none of them get very many lines, are wooden at best. I found myself wondering where the hell writer-director Maryam Keshavarz even found the woman who plays Leila’s father’s doctor. She sounds like she’s barely even sure she knows her lines.

We also get flashbacks to Leila’s own childhood, and both that actor (Chiara Stella) and the young Shireen (Kamand Shafieisabet) are charming enough—although the young Shireen has little time for charming as she carries multiple babies before she’s even fifteen. The fact that Shireen is married off to a young man of 22 when she was 13 is presented with neutrality, and cultural differences notwithstanding, I don’t know how I feel about that. Being told that “we were intellectual equals” does little to mitigate it. The background does, however, inform the nature of Shireen as a hard working, crazily tenacious middle-aged mother.

And it’s very easy to engage with both the adult Shireen and the adult Leila whenever they are onscreen. Leila’s sexuality is handled with awkwardness at best, a big part of her estrangement with her mother, but we learn that Leila’s selfishness played a part in her marriage to and then divorce from another woman. (A scene in which they have a conversation in a department store while Leila has a gorilla mask on really doesn’t work.) Leila consistently self-identifies as a lesbian, but then has a one night stand with an apparently mostly-straight man who happens to be playing the lead in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and ax (Tom Byrne) declares, upon learning of Leila’s pregnancy, that he wants to try making a go of a relationship. Leila seems oddly open to this. I thought she was supposed to be a lesbian? Sure, yes, sexuality is fluid—except The Persian Version never gets even cose to interrogating such ideas. Like so many other things in this movie, I could not figure out what to make of it.

And still: even in the midst of all this mess, the two leads deliver winning performances, which broadly won me over. I was moved and cried a little at the end. There’s a lot about being children of immigrant parents here that I’m sure many can relate to, and I can only guess how nice it must be for Muslim or Iranian audiences to get this kind of fun representation. I don’t want to conflate Iranians with Palestinians, but Americans are unfortunately prone to such things, and right now more than ever, anything that humanizes Muslims as nuanced individuals can only be a good thing.

I just wish the execution had been a bit cleaner. This movie has some bad editing, in one instance cutting right when one of Leila’s brothers appears to start saying something to someone in a direction that makes no sense. Was the actor about to say something to a key grip or what?The more I write this very review, the more I wonder why I think I liked it even as much as I did. How did it win me over? Well, it won me over with two standout performances in a sea of confused ineptitude, captured with incongruously competent cinematography.

*These two might win you over. Maybe. We’ll see.*

Overall: B-