Appropriate Behaviour: Interview with Desiree Akhavan

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]head of the European release of her debut feature film Appropriate Behaviour, tn2 spoke with its director, writer and lead actor Desiree Akhavan. Her wry and witty comedy depicts thoughtfully, sensitively, and often brutally a decisive span of time in the life of its tailspun protagonist Shirin — plotting in parallel and synchronising sincerely across the film’s narrative both the delightful beginning, and then devastating collapse, of her relationship with Maxine (Rebecca Henderson). Shirin wanders aimless through Brooklyn, circles blocks and eventually turns corners. It seems a familiar trajectory but Shirin’s scenario proves a unique one — like her character, Akhavan is a bisexual, Iranian-American woman and has created from her lived experience and individual perspective a film that has drawn much enthusiastic acclaim for balancing such universals and particulars. Akhavan describes her feeling of achievement with the film, happy that “a girl trying to figure her shit out in New York could on some level make someone with an entirely different life, laugh… and hopefully empathise.”

Being an Iranian-American implies a certain identity, and the same thing with being in the queer community, and what if you don’t fit those things naturally? What if the norm is not you? I thought those were the questions I wanted to answer.

Akhavan’s film is primarily a character study. Yet, in a modern, and quite profound way, Appropriate Behaviour explores what comprises and constructs character itself, charting how one might struggle to define themselves on their own terms and without borrowing the terminology of another, seized in a sense between a kind-of belonging and unbelonging. Shirin, reluctant and hesitant, negotiates her identity as the adjectives accrue around her and urge to be ordered and sequenced into some meaningful multi-hyphenate, this potentially alienating and essentialising threat of proper nouns, cultural signifiers and reductive qualifiers— this dynamic of descriptors — becoming one of the film’s central issues. Intrigued, struck and a little bit in agony, on asking Akhavan about the troubles of types and traditions in Appropriate Behaviour, she responds: “I think it’s a film about how people choose to identify themselves, how they fit into the niches of the identities [and] also, when you’re born into some of those identities, what that means for your life. Being an Iranian-American implies a certain identity, and the same thing with being in the queer community, and what if you don’t fit those things naturally? What if the norm is not you? I thought those were the questions I wanted to answer.”

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Akhavan’s depiction of Shirin is uncompromising, and the three graphic sex scenes of the film, each prove essential to the ongoing characterisation of the protagonist, though in differing ways. It’s never gratuitous — perhaps it is inevitable in a film like Appropriate Behaviour that explores sexuality resolutely and explicitly — and the subtext in each is striking. Akhavan succeeds in chasing and capturing the truth of a moment, one such example being a memorable, and particularly inspired instance in which Shirin and Maxine, in an early stoned post-coital bliss, poke fun at that awful idiom “no homo”: “I’m fascinated by the first time you get stoned with someone you’re falling in love with, and what happens in those moments. It’s like meeting a new side of their personality, and that whole conversation, writing that dialogue, was one of my favourite parts of writing the script because it was like chasing a thought of — well, what would they have never talked about on a date? What would they have not got to yet? […] You know, I think, at least [in] my stoned mind, one thing triggers another thought triggers another thought triggers another thought, and they never connect them all, and I wanted to be able to talk about the most banal and the most political, that ‘no homo’ is both incredibly banal and incredibly political.”

Another intriguing sequence, beginning with a disastrous first date, before unexpectedly, and spontaneously developing into a bleak and thwarted threesome, jars in introducing some heavy pathos to this otherwise noisy fumbling of limbs and latex playsuits. Akhavan describes the experience of directing, writing and starring in her own sex scenes: “It would have been a lot harder for me to have starred in the sex scenes if I wasn’t in the director’s seat. I felt really comfortable and I knew exactly what I wanted, from the get-go. I think it would be a lot harder — I mean I would if I trusted a director, if I understood, and that’s the way I try to work with my actors […] I showed them storyboards […] I choreographed the scene and had a specific idea about how I wanted it to be. I don’t storyboard the rest of the film and I like to be flexible with movement and blocking on set — but those were the three scenes that I knew exactly how I wanted them to look and they’re the closest to how I saw them in my head, and how I scripted them at the very beginning.”

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Shirin, though, is still somewhat of a departure from Akhavan, who says of Appropriate Behaviour: “I like to say that it’s incredibly personal, but it’s definitely not autobiographical, in that the events of the film never took place. But as I was writing it I was dealing with the aftermath of a breakup and having come out to my parents so I wanted to take those scenes and put them in this heightened fictional world of how I saw the absurdity of Brooklyn, and the Iranian-American community and the lesbian community […] all these things that I felt I could never fit into. And that’s what led to the scenes in the film — but I made it all up, in terms of the details and the characters.”

I wanted to be able to talk about the most banal and the most political, that ‘no homo’ is both incredibly banal and incredibly political.

Being her first full-length feature, the film proceeds from Akhavan’s 2009 short film Nose Job, and her chronicling of “superficial, homophobic lesbians” in subsequent web-series The Slope, Appropriate Behaviour representing both a temporary summit for the young filmmaker and a declarative indication of the arrival of a new, exciting voice in cinema. On why she does what she does, Akhavan explains: “I was always interested in telling stories. As a little kid I wrote scripts, you know, starting at the age of nine […] So then, I thought I’d be in theatre, because I lived in New York City and it was what I thought was the next natural step, so I wrote a lot of plays […] but then when I got to college I took a filmmaking class on a lark — a friend of mine was taking a class so I joined her — and it instantly made sense that this is what I should be doing. I think I was nineteen or twenty at the time, and after that I completely abandoned theatre and spent all my time focusing on pursuing filmmaking.”

Premiering at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Appropriate Behaviour went on to receive an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay. Akhavan reflects on the film’s unquestionable success: “It’s been pretty incredible […] I’ve been amazed by the similarities of all the audiences, and how everyone’s been responding. I see the positives and that’s really nice, I’ve been blessed in that way, and I think no one wants to be mean to your face especially when you star in the film; it’s a different relationship than if you had just directed it, I think people are willing to be more critical to your face in that respect because they assume that you don’t have as much ownership of it. But either way I just felt like the people who come and the people who stay for the Q&As have understood it and that it’s spoken to them on some level — not always the same level, not always quite literally or straightforwardly — but on some level. It’s really funny, I’m always surprised by the straight men in like, their forties, who love it. Like the sense of humour really speaks to them […] I never used to hang out with frat boy types, but what I’ve found is that my sense of humour has a real kinship with those types of dudes.”

Promisingly, Appropriate Behaviour lies quite remarkably at the important intersection in the representation of LGBT stories, Iranian-American stories, and young women’s stories — a hopeful sign of what might be achieved in American independent film by those with the DIY attitude of Akhavan, present during the ongoing democratisation of the medium, embracing innovations in technology and emerging (generally online) models of distribution. One surefire way to guarantee that there will be new stories to tell is to have new voices tell them. What is sometimes, and often with a gendered and sometimes generational bias, called “narcissistic” in contemporary filmmaking might actually be an effort to engage or connect with a viewer, a filmmaker offering a welcome invitation into their world, their point-of-view and perspective, insight into another human being in all their likewise multiplicity, combinations and complexity — a filmmaker sharing their experiences that made them what they are, and, in the process, making the world feel a little bit smaller.

Appropriate Behaviour is out now at the Irish Film Institute. Read our review of the film here.

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