Appropriate
Behaviour ***
Dir: Desiree
Akhavan. Starring: Desiree Akhavan, Rebecca Henderson, Halley Feiffer, Scott
Adsit. 15 cert, 86 min
The Brooklyn-set romcom Appropriate
Behaviour opens in the manner of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, with its protagonist ruefully picking over a failed
relationship; it will conclude with a lift from Stardust Memories, with a fleeting moment of serendipity on a
subway train. What’s different is the perspective, which for once isn’t that of
some hunched Woody wannabe kvetching his way into premature middle age. Meet,
instead, Desiree Akhavan, tall, female, bisexual, Iranian-American: one of
several young writer-directors who’ve reclaimed the streets of New York since
Allen packed up his altogether fustier sexual politics and set off on his
European tour.
Akhavan’s currently visible on TV’s Girls,
and some of the potshots she takes at the East Coast creative scene in this,
her feature debut, have a Lena Dunham-y ring: rebounding from one awkward
encounter to the next, Akhavan’s lovelorn teacher Shirin encounters both
artists going through a “sandcastle-slash-found object” phase and folk
rock/stand-up hybrid acts. Also very Dunham-ish: one excruciating threesome in
which no-one seems to be getting what they signed up for. That’s your twenties,
Akhavan concludes, from the relative comfort of her early thirties – a lot of
experimentation and drift, with no guarantee of a satisfying outcome.
Sometimes it’s hard to know where Shirin’s drift stops and the film’s begins.
Akhavan’s background – she co-created the webseries The Slope – shows through in a baggily episodic structure. Shirin’s
shrugging attempts to come out to her parents (Anh Duong and Hooman Majd) –
hardly hardliners, rather beacons of comfortable, Westernised tolerance –
suggests a reluctance to press the issue of sexual identity too hard. With the
narrative stakes perilously low, the would-be crowdpleasing finale – involving
schoolchildren dressed up as farting zombies – falls somewhere between ramshackle
and a little desperate.
Still, even that sequence retains an appreciably hand-turned feel, and
many of the preceding skits are genuinely funny: Shirin’s run-in with a snippy
lingerie saleswoman rings true, and I liked her quizzical interactions with a
stoner colleague, played by 30 Rock’s
Scott Adsit – voice of Big Hero 6’s
Baymax, and therefore pretty much the best thing in movies right now. The
radical claims being made for Appropriate
Behaviour feel overstated: it’s another indie premised on the fixing-up of
a broken heart, and its relentless snark proves mildly wearying. It’s Akhavan’s
presence that elevates it above a crowded field. Her film’s a little bit
different from the norm, and that – for now – is promising enough.
Appropriate Behaviour opens in cinemas nationwide today.
No comments:
Post a Comment