Appropriate Behavior
Director: Desiree Akhavan
Writer: Desiree Akhavan
Cast: Desiree Akhavan, Rebecca Henderson, Halley Feiffer, Ryan Fitzsimmons, Anh Duong, Rosalie Lowe, Scott Adsit
Part of: identities Festival
Seen on: 11.6.2015

Plot:
Bisexual Shirin (Desiree Akhavan) just broke up with her girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson), or rather Maxine dumped her and Shirin tries everything to get her back – or at least get over her. That involves getting a new job as a teacher in a kindergarten where she tries to teach the kids how to make a film, slightly stalking Maxine, and having loads of sex with different people. Maybe she can even work up the courage to come out to her traditionally Iranian family.

I enjoyed Appropriate Behavior. It was funny and well-made, even if not everything completely worked for me.

Appropriate Behavior gives off a similar vibe like Obvious Child or Frances Ha, both in the fact that they are movies about not particularly mature, hip women in New York, but mostly in their sense of humor that is rowdier than is traditionally expected from women and about as mature as the women themselves: which is to say not a lot. It usually leaves me with mixed feelings, sometimes more positively mixed and sometimes more negatively. In this case, it was the former (in the case of Girls I couldn’t even make it through the first episode).

The bigger problem for me was the way Shirin just couldn’t let Maxine go. I am aware that this is mostly my personal issue: it’s not easy to get over somebody. But desperate attempts at getting somebody back who broke up with you personally rub me raw – because I always identify with the dumper and never with the desperate dumpee: They kicked you out and broke your heart. Have some dignity and let things go. It may take a while – but that is time that you have to spend with yourself and not time you can spend with wooing the dumper. Respect the boundaries they set.
Anyway, Shirin can’t let go that easily and it was exhausting to me in the audience.

In any case there is a lot more to love about Appropriate Behavior than is irritating about it: I loved that Shirin calls herself a bisexual in those words (something Orange is the New Black hasn’t managed so far, despite its bi or pan protagonist). I loved how Akhavan includes the Iranian background into Shirin’s life and the film. The cast was really good.

Above all it was the sex scenes that stole my heart: Akhavan has a wonderful talent to make a sex scene look extremely awkward. The various sex Shirin has ranges from well-meaning to uncomfortable and it is never necessary to comment on it at all: you just watch it and you think: yup, I can imagine things would turn weird that way. Or even: yup, I’ve had that exact one night stand, it was awful. Since we usually only ever get great, problem-free sex in films, 20 seconds of passion followed by orgasms where nothing ever goes wrong, it was wonderful to see sex like this for once. We could do with more of that, as we could do with more films about bisexual US-Iranians with a sense of humor.

Summarizing: Very fine indeed.