Appro­pri­ate Behaviour

A with­er­ing­ly dry com­e­dy about a young per­son try­ing to make sense of her­self amidst the ridicu­lous­ness of mod­ern Brook­lyn, Appro­pri­ate Behav­iour doesn’t just sound like a recent Amer­i­can indie, it sounds like all of them. But writer/​director Desiree Akhavan’s warm, fun­ny and hon­est fea­ture debut — in which the writer/​director essen­tial­ly plays the per­son she used to be — tow­ers above the crowd pre­cise­ly because its mak­er seems to have van­quished the inse­cu­ri­ties of her on-screen proxy.

A low-bud­get movie made by some­one grad­u­at­ing from a low-bud­get web series (Akhavan’s show, The Slope, brought great hon­our to its for­mat), Appro­pri­ate Behav­iour has all the super­fi­cial hall­marks of a first film, and Scott Adsit (aka the bald guy from 30 Rock) is by far its biggest name. Nev­er­the­less, it’s imme­di­ate­ly clear that, unlike so many oth­er inau­gur­al efforts, this is a movie made by some­one who knows exact­ly who she is, even if she had to learn it the hard way.

It’s all there in the con­vic­tion with which the recent­ly sin­gle Shirin (Akha­van) retrieves her ex-girlfriend’s mas­sive dil­do from a trash­can in the film’s first scene. Things didn’t end well with Max­ine (Rebec­ca Hen­der­son), who resent­ed Shirin for not com­ing out to her tra­di­tion­al Per­sian par­ents, and much of the film is devot­ed to tem­po­ral­ly errat­ic flash­backs of their rela­tion­ship as Shirin tries to unpack what went wrong.

Lena Dunham’s Girls is the obvi­ous ref­er­ence point here, and it’s hard­ly a coin­ci­dence that Akha­van was cast in that show’s fourth series — you can prac­ti­cal­ly hear Dun­ham fire off an email to her cast­ing direc­tor as Shirin looks into Maxine’s eyes and says, ​“I hate so many things, too” before mov­ing in for their sweet first kiss. And though Akha­van is attuned to the cul­tur­al speci­fici­ty of her expe­ri­ence in a way that bet­ter allows her film to strad­dle the line between the uni­ver­sal and the inti­mate­ly per­son­al, she shares Dunham’s gift for laugh­ing at the absur­di­ty of a world that doesn’t seem to have any place for her in it, and the shame that can make some­one feel.

Woody Allen might be a more accu­rate com­par­i­son, how­ev­er, and not just because the movie’s frac­tured chronol­o­gy is so evoca­tive of Annie Hall. Akha­van shares Allen’s tal­ent for being on the bor­der of every scene she’s in; even in the film’s cen­tre­piece scene, a hilar­i­ous­ly awk­ward three-way involv­ing way too much latex, Shirin is both a par­tic­i­pant and an observ­er, Akha­van know­ing that the char­ac­ter will all find this fun­ny one day.

For all of its mat­ter-of-fact mod­esty, how­ev­er, Appro­pri­ate Behav­iour comes unique­ly into its own as Shirin comes into hers. Akha­van does small won­ders with the role she was born to play, and by the time her film gets to its note-per­fect con­clu­sion, it’s clear that she’s noth­ing less than a true original.