She’s a bright young thing trying to make it as a creative type in Brooklyn. Her love life is excruciating, her tone confessional. She’s young, underemployed and surrounded by hipsters. She may even earn the “controversial” label. Sound familiar?
Meet Desiree Akhavan, the bisexual Persian-American writer-director-star who has been tabbed as the next Lena Dunham by practically everyone who has seen her Sundance premiere, “Appropriate Behavior.” We meet her character Shirin when she leaves her Park Slope apartment with a sex toy, its harness dangling forlorn in her hand. She’s in the dumps after having just broken up with her girlfriend Max.
Soon Shirin is confessing to her mom, “I’m a little bit gay.” The film is so graphic that Akhavan plans to make a cut with toned-down sex scenes, just for her conservative dad.
“In my experience,” Akhavan, 29, told AfterEllen.com, “Life is always slipping back and forth between comedic farce and tragic melodrama, so I appreciate it when films get the balance right and make it feel truthful.”
Funny, honest and bitingly personal, “Appropriate Behavior,” which has not yet been acquired by a distributor, details the comic tribulations of Shirin, a young woman struggling to get over a breakup with a serious girlfriend while coming out to her parents. “Annie Hall” is an obvious inspiration for the film, with its nonlinear time structure and its mix of laughs and chronic dissatisfaction. Akhavan has said the film is inspired by her experiences but resists the term “autobiographical.”
“Even if the events had taken place, the minute you write something down it becomes fiction,” she told Filmmaker magazine. “That said, all my work is personal and therefore cathartic. I like to write about things I’ve grappled with and take control of them in that way.”
Raised in upstate New York, Akhavan went to Smith College, then went on to graduate school at NYU, where “Appropriate Behavior” got started as her graduate thesis. Gaining experience with her irreverent Web series “The Slope” (billed as a comedy about “superficial, homophobic lesbians”) she started shooting the feature last year in Brooklyn and completed filming in 18 days.
“Appropriate Behavior” takes digs at Brooklyn’s hyperactive creativity (her character gets a gig teaching a filmmaking class to 5-year-olds who are busy re-enacting Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”) and its hipster finishing-school quality. Talking to a beardy, catatonically laid-back dude with tats, she asks, “What is up with your passive disinterest in everything? Seriously, what happened at Wesleyan that did this to you?” There’s also a woeful failed-threesome scene that has been getting big laughs.
Her parents (who fled Iran after the 1979 fundamentalist revolution) have only known about Akhavan’s sexuality for a few years, and now this. She’s is pretty sure her mom likes the new movie, whereas her dad’s response was a bit more measured. (He prefers “Two and a Half Men,” apparently.) “My brother was the one most grossed out,” she told Variety.
As for the Dunham comparisons, Akhavan has been dodging them while acknowledging she is a fan of the “Girls” creator. “She’s my age and a female and doing comedy, so in that respect it’s totally fair,” she told Movies.com. “But at the same time, I’m really hoping that in five years time we can live in a world where there’s more than one intelligent, funny woman making films and television.”