Directing One’s Own Life (and Sexuality) in ‘Appropriate Behavior’

‘Appropriate Behavior’ is thus a product and a triumph of female authorship and agency in the male-dominated film and entertainment industry. … Just as Desiree Akhavan went to lengths to ensure her agency and authorship as a filmmaker, Shirin engages with her bisexuality frankly and honestly…

Appropriate Behavior

This guest post written by Deborah Krieger is an edited version that originally appeared at I on the Arts. It is cross-posted with permission.


In Desiree Akhavan’s 2014 film Appropriate Behavior, Shirin (Akhavan), the protagonist, struggles to find her place in both her traditional Iranian family and as a newly-single bisexual woman in New York City. In addition to starring as the protagonist, Akhavan also wrote and directed this offbeat, independent drama-comedy film, basing several of the elements of the film on her own life and experiences, although the plot is fictional. The film premiered at Sundance, where it was perceived as a “breakout,” received a limited theatrical release, and is currently available through various online streaming sources, including iTunes and Amazon Prime. While the film was not a financial success, grossing only $46,000, it put Akhavan on the map, earning her comparisons to Lena Dunham, a writer/director/actor of similar comedic material, and earned her a guest role on Dunham’s HBO show Girls, although Akhavan shrugs off the comparison.

Appropriate Behavior features not only a female creator, star, and director, but also a female executive producer (Katie Mustard), producer (Cecelia Frugiuele) — indeed, women make up at least half of the crew of the film. It is thus fair to say that Appropriate Behavior is a classic example of women’s cinema, which refers to films that have women in positions of creative control, as well as films that are geared towards a female audience. In an industry where women comprise only 9 percent of film directors, 11 percent of writers and 20 percent of executive producers in the top 250 filmsAppropriate Behavior’s crew is quite impressive in terms of giving women control over the production of the film.

Appropriate Behavior is thus a product and a triumph of female authorship and agency in the male-dominated film and entertainment industry. Essentially, Appropriate Behavior addresses female production and agency not only in the background processes of the film, but also in content, as exemplified through Shirin’s trials and travails over the course of the film. Shirin aims to take control of her life post-breakup and establish her identity in relationship to the world around her. She gets a new job teaching filmmaking to five year-olds, moves into a new apartment, and, most importantly, tries to get over her ex-girlfriend Maxine by seeking out and engaging sexually with partners both male and female, including a leader of a feminist discussion group and a hip swinging young couple. In short, Shirin’s desire to create her own new life post-Maxine is analogous to the process of Akhavan’s making her film independently, serving as writer, director, and star, and exemplifies Shirin’s own sexual and personal agency as an active female character. Both Shirin and the film Appropriate Behavior exist outside of the mainstream: Shirin is a bisexual woman of color in an industry where films are usually made about straight white men (whites making up 70 percent of the protagonists in 2014 Hollywood films, men 88 percent, with LGBT characters only accounting for 17.5 percent of all characters), and Appropriate Behavior is an independently financed and distributed film not made to satisfy commercial needs or beckon broad appeal. At the beginning of the film Shirin starts with nothing — she is unhappily single, in need of a home, and looking for a new job — and must start from scratch, just as Akhavan conceived of the fictional story of the film, beginning, one assumes, with a white blank page. Indeed, when it comes to its depiction of sexuality, Appropriate Behavior through its form and content, center the idea of female agency and authorship, whether behind or in front of the camera.

Appropriate Behavior reflects the choices made by Desiree Akhavan throughout her burgeoning career as a filmmaker to maintain her independence, control and agency over her projects. Filmmaker Michelle Citron, in her essay “Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream,”[1] creates a divide between usage of the terms “film-maker” [sic] versus “director,” arguing that a filmmaker exercises more “control” over her product than does a director, who trades control for increased “power” within the mainstream Hollywood production structure and, one assumes, the ability to direct projects with larger and larger budgets and commercial appeal further down the line. In the interview with Professor Patricia White preceding the screening of Appropriate Behavior at the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, Akhavan spoke about the difficulty of getting Appropriate Behavior financed, since, as both she and Citron point out, the kind of projects Hollywood supports are the kind that have been proven to be revenue-generating in the past.[2] Akhavan noted that even within the niche of more mainstream LGBT films she had little luck, since her film was a comedy, not a drama (in the vein of, perhaps, Brokeback Mountain), and thus did not receive any grants, and because her film centers on a bisexual woman of color and not white gay men, it was harder to find support.

Appropriate Behavior 4

Additionally, while Akhavan did not explicitly reference Citron’s filmmaker versus director argument, she did point out that as a woman behind the camera, she had been offered to direct mainstream comedies — for example, something starring Zac Efron — but that she turned those offers down because she wanted to direct her own her projects, even though by this token she was trading a chance at power within the Hollywood mainstream for control over a much smaller film, as per the Citron model.

In terms of the film’s content, the depiction of Shirin’s sexuality also emphasizes her choices and agency in her (attempted) sexual encounters with both men and women. Just as Akhavan went to lengths to ensure her agency and authorship as a filmmaker, Shirin engages with her bisexuality frankly and honestly, seeking out partners whom she believes will make her happy (or at least satisfied), regardless of how society views her sexual orientation. She pursues a male partner for a one-night stand over OkCupid, a female feminist group discussion leader, and a couple, who invites her into their home for a threesome. In one key scene in the film, Shirin attempts to revive her existence as a sexual single woman by going to a lingerie shop and hesitantly requesting to be shown “underwear of a woman in charge of her sexuality and not afraid of change.”

Despite her attempts to prove otherwise to herself, Shirin’s sexual identity and agency is anything but assured, as the audience learns over the course of the film, and is a source of both happiness and pain for her. In her article “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” which addresses conceptions of female sexuality through a feminist lens, Carole S. Vance cites a “powerful tension”[3] between pleasure and danger. While Appropriate Behavior does not explicitly define itself as feminist or anti-feminist, its take on female sexuality, especially Shirin’s bisexuality, is indicative of the divide between pleasure and danger that Vance addresses. In the film, Shirin’s bisexuality within both straight and lesbian contexts is treated as dangerous and “other”; her straight brother doubts that bisexuality is real and calls her “sexually confused,” while her ex-girlfriend Maxine, in a particularly harsh moment, wonders aloud if their relationship was just a “phase” for Shirin — particularly damning for a bisexual woman, since they are often perceived as experimenting or, indeed, “confused.” Additionally, Shirin’s sexuality is a source of stress — and, indeed, danger — in the film, because Shirin worries about alienating her traditional Persian family if she comes out to them, which is one of the causes of the breakdown of Shirin’s and Maxine’s relationship.

Appropriate Behavior

Furthermore, during the discussion with Akhavan, when the topic of filming sex scenes came up, she spoke of her enthusiasm for participating and directing these kinds of scenes, adding that she felt “empowered” by this type of material. However, what was interesting in the interview, vis-à-vis Vance’s discussion of pornography being demonized by certain feminists, is that one of the sex scenes (likely the threesome) worried Akhavan because she thought it was too close to pornography, rather than an honest depiction of sex, and had to be reassured by her producer that it would turn out to be acceptable. In the scene in question, Shirin engages sexually with the couple, then watches awkwardly as they engage with one another, leaving her out. Where the scene becomes “dangerous,” in a sense, for Shirin is the strange connection she makes with the female half of the couple — a connection that so unnerves as disturbs her that she feels obligated to leave the couple’s apartment. Through Akhavan’s intervention, a scene that could have been aimed at the male gaze and meant to titillate like pornography becomes more emotional and meaningful, with the nudity serving to advance the sentiment of the scene as well as the plot of the film. What is emphasized both in the film and in Akhavan’s commentary is the sense of female power and agency in that both Shirin and Akhavan have, and had, the opportunity and luxury of pursuing and expressing their sexuality in or through the making of the film, even if the outcome for Shirin is not what she expected.

Thus, with regards to both the behind-the-scenes processes as well as the narrative of the film, Appropriate Behavior exemplifies and addresses issues of female authorship and agency. Desiree Akhavan asserted herself not only by writing, directing, and starring in her own film, as well as hiring many women to serve on the production team, but also refusing to take on projects that would diminish her agency and control over the process and end result, preferring to be an author and filmmaker rather than a director-for-hire. Similarly, Shirin alternately asserts (and questions) her identity over the course of the film through her displays of sexuality and the choices she makes, ultimately reaching a place where she is feeling hopeful about her own life and ready to move forward, as emphasized by her finally throwing away the strap-on Maxine insisted Shirin take as part of their break-up. In Akhavan’s career as well as the content she creates, it would seem, women’s ability and agency to be sexual, to be oneself and make one’s own choices, to direct one’s own life, as it were, are paramount. Ultimately, Appropriate Behavior succeeds as a feminist film, in my view, insomuch as we can tie female agency and authorship to feminism, because it keenly addresses these concepts both behind and in front of the camera.


See also: In ‘Appropriate Behavior’: What Does It Take for a Woman to Author Herself?


Notes: 

[1]: Michelle Citron, “Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream,” in The Gender and Media Reader, ed. Mary Celeste Kearney (New York: Routledge, 2012), 177.

[2]: Desiree Akhavan, interview by Patricia White at the Penn Humanities Forum, September 25, 2015.

[3]: Carole S. Vance, “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge, 1984), 1.


Deborah Krieger is a senior at Swarthmore College, studying art history, film and media studies, and German. She has written for Hyperallergic, Hooligan Magazine, the Northwestern Art Review, The Stake, and Title Magazine. She also runs her own art blog, I On the Arts, and curates her life in pictures @Debonthearts on Instagram.

‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’ and Scares Us

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would.

GirlNightCover


This repost by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.


Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies.  So in the generically titled A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,  the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

The film takes place in a parallel California which contains a Farsi-speaking, Iranian enclave called “Bad City.” We know we’re not in Iran because the pimp has visible tattoos and later we see a woman in public with her hair and much of her body uncovered. Also The Girl wears her chador in such a way that we see her hipster, stripey, boat shirt (too short for modest dress) and skinny jeans underneath.

In spite of its surface differences, the film to which Girl has the greatest parallel is probably David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film, every sumptuous, black and white shot is framed and lit with care, creating an alternate universe for the audience to lose themselves in. And as in Eraserhead, even what we hear is fussed over in a way that grabs our attention: incidental sounds are recorded close. The proximity doesn’t alienate us, the way less skillful dubbing in other films often does, but gives us a heightened sense of intimacy, as if we are almost touching the characters.

GirlNightThroat

When The Girl interrogates The Street Urchin (a young boy played by Milad Eghbali) the film shows a truth that many films, including horror films, elide–but that the other recent acclaimed horror film directed by a woman, The Babadook, also addresses–the first person who scares us when we are children is often a woman, whether it’s a mother or another woman authority figure. Tilda Swinton has said that her character in Snowpiercer was based on a particularly terrifying nanny from her own childhood. Few lines in films this year have been more chilling than the one The Girl leaves The Street Urchin with after she threatens him: “Be a good boy.”

Like Michael Almereyda, who, in the ’90s made a stylish black and white film about a woman vampire among New York hipsters, Nadja (its star, Elina Löwensohn, had eyes you couldn’t look away from, much like Vand’s) Amirpour combines familiar elements in an unfamiliar way for maximum resonance. In Almereyda’s modern day New York Hamlet (from 2000), he famously incorporated a video of  Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talking about “being” in the background of a scene, priming us to later hear Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy.

In Girl Amirpour gets at how women in modest Muslim dress (including those from Iran) are used for xenophobic and anti-Islamic fear-mongering (often in the guise of “feminism”) in the US (like in the recent ad campaign for Homeland) but also uses a chador’s resemblance to a cape to give us an eerily familiar–but new–“Dracula” silhouette. When The Girl rides on the skateboard The Street Urchin leaves behind (after he runs away from her in terror) the chador billows around her as she rolls down the road, and she becomes, without CGI trickery, a bat in flight.

Americans often read chador on women to mean vulnerability, but like the frail-seeming, pale, young, blonde Mae in another beautifully-shot, vampire Western (also directed by a woman, the pre-Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow) 1987’s Near Dark, who, when her cowboy boyfriend lassoes her as a “joke” takes hold of the rope and pulls him in, The Girl has hidden reserves of strength. The Girl becomes an avenging angel in black, attacking the men we see abuse women, using her “traditional” quiet passivity to draw these guys close. As the abusive men do with the cat who is many times in the frame (rarely has a filmmaker caught how much of our daily lives our animals witness) they ascribe motivations and personas to The Girl which are more about their own perceptions than about who she is or what she is thinking.

Like a number of films Girl has an early scene, fast becoming a campy cliché, in which a woman suggestively sucks the finger of a man. But when The Girl takes the pimp’s forefinger into her mouth, he gets more than he bargained for.

And as we do with Mae, we see that The Girl is lonely, and a hapless, good-looking guy, Arash, played by Arash Marandi touches something in her. When they meet, he’s coming from a costume party where he’s taken some of the club drugs he was dealing and is still wearing a vampire cape as he stares into a street light. She immediately becomes protective of him.

GirlNightEyeliner

Vand’s presence burns through the screen. She has the intensity of the great silent actresses–and in many of her scenes, the ones in her room plastered with ’80s music posters, dancing by herself to Farsi synth-pop records or even when she interacts with other characters, she often does not speak. This film is low on back story but Vand’s face, especially her huge dark eyes (we see her put on her heavy eyeliner in the bathroom mirror before she goes out) tells us what she is feeling in every scene.

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would. His clothes (a plain white t-shirt and jeans that hug his muscled body) also evoke Dean’s. And even though the pimp, Saeed, is a villain, meant to repel us, Amirpour lets us take in the attractiveness of his body, especially in a shirtless scene with The Girl when his pants hang very low and we see the full extent of his tattoos–and his muscles.

LA has enough Iranian-Americans in it that some have nicknamed it “Tehrangeles” (after Iran’s capital), but I can’t think of another film produced near there (Girl was actually filmed in Bakersfield) in which most (or all) of the cast is of Persian descent, but no one is a terrorist or a relic from the old country.  These characters speak Farsi to each other but, except for Arash’s father, with his drug addiction and collection of pre-revolutionary framed photos of family (complete with 60s-style teased hair on the women), these people aren’t living in the past–even The Girl’s retro record collection, clothes and bobbed hair reflect present-day fashion.

We can never know for sure, but just as with Black actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw giving two terrific, completely different star-turns in movies in one year but the media still largely ignoring her, I wonder if  Amirpour’s flawless visual sense, skill with actors and unique reworking of a genre many of us thought didn’t have an original angle left would garner more attention if she were a white guy. Girl is distributed in partnership with VICE‘s film arm and has even made some year-end, top-10 lists, but I had to go to New York to see it and whole countries (like Canada) have yet to get even limited distribution. Nevertheless Amirpour continues to work on films unimpeded. Her next work is about cannibals. I can’t wait until its release.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YGmTdo3vuY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

___________________________________________________

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’ and Scares Us

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,’ the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

GirlNightCover

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies.  So in the generically titled A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,  the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

The film takes place in a parallel California which contains a Farsi-speaking, Iranian enclave called “Bad City.” We know we’re not in Iran because the pimp has visible tattoos and later we see a woman in public with her hair and much of her body uncovered. Also The Girl wears her chador in such a way that we see her hipster, stripey, boat shirt (too short for modest dress) and skinny jeans underneath.

In spite of its surface differences, the film to which Girl has the greatest parallel is probably David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film, every sumptuous, black and white shot is framed and lit with care, creating an alternate universe for the audience to lose themselves in. And as in Eraserhead, even what we hear is fussed over in a way that grabs our attention: incidental sounds are recorded close. The proximity doesn’t alienate us, the way less skillful dubbing in other films often does, but gives us a heightened sense of intimacy, as if we are almost touching the characters.

GirlNightThroat

When The Girl interrogates The Street Urchin (a young boy played by Milad Eghbali) the film shows a truth that many films, including horror films, elide–but that the other recent acclaimed horror film directed by a woman, The Babadook, also addresses–the first person who scares us when we are children is often a woman, whether it’s a mother or another woman authority figure. Tilda Swinton has said that her character in Snowpiercer was based on a particularly terrifying nanny from her own childhood. Few lines in films this year have been more chilling than the one The Girl leaves The Street Urchin with after she threatens him: “Be a good boy.”

Like Michael Almereyda, who, in the ’90s made a stylish black and white film about a woman vampire among New York hipsters, Nadja (its star, Elina Löwensohn, had eyes you couldn’t look away from, much like Vand’s) Amirpour combines familiar elements in an unfamiliar way for maximum resonance. In Almereyda’s modern day New York Hamlet (from 2000), he famously incorporated a video of  Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talking about “being” in the background of a scene, priming us to later hear Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy.

In Girl Amirpour gets at how women in modest Muslim dress (including those from Iran) are used for xenophobic and anti-Islamic fear-mongering (often in the guise of “feminism”) in the US (like in the recent ad campaign for Homeland) but also uses a chador’s resemblance to a cape to give us an eerily familiar–but new–“Dracula” silhouette. When The Girl rides on the skateboard The Street Urchin leaves behind (after he runs away from her in terror) the chador billows around her as she rolls down the road, and she becomes, without CGI trickery, a bat in flight.

Americans often read chador on women to mean vulnerability, but like the frail-seeming, pale, young, blonde Mae in another beautifully-shot, vampire Western (also directed by a woman, the pre-Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow) 1987’s Near Dark, who, when her cowboy boyfriend lassoes her as a “joke” takes hold of the rope and pulls him in, The Girl has hidden reserves of strength. The Girl becomes an avenging angel in black, attacking the men we see abuse women, using her “traditional” quiet passivity to draw these guys close. As the abusive men do with the cat who is many times in the frame (rarely has a filmmaker caught how much of our daily lives our animals witness) they ascribe motivations and personas to The Girl which are more about their own perceptions than about who she is or what she is thinking.

Like a number of films Girl has an early scene, fast becoming a campy cliché, in which a woman suggestively sucks the finger of a man. But when The Girl takes the pimp’s forefinger into her mouth, he gets more than he bargained for.

And as we do with Mae, we see that The Girl is lonely, and a hapless, good-looking guy, Arash, played by Arash Marandi touches something in her. When they meet, he’s coming from a costume party where he’s taken some of the club drugs he was dealing and is still wearing a vampire cape as he stares into a street light. She immediately becomes protective of him.

GirlNightEyeliner

Vand’s presence burns through the screen. She has the intensity of the great silent actresses–and in many of her scenes, the ones in her room plastered with ’80s music posters, dancing by herself to Farsi synth-pop records or even when she interacts with other characters, she often does not speak. This film is low on back story but Vand’s face, especially her huge dark eyes (we see her put on her heavy eyeliner in the bathroom mirror before she goes out) tells us what she is feeling in every scene.

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would. His clothes (a plain white t-shirt and jeans that hug his muscled body) also evoke Dean’s. And even though the pimp, Saeed, is a villain, meant to repel us, Amirpour lets us take in the attractiveness of his body, especially in a shirtless scene with The Girl when his pants hang very low and we see the full extent of his tattoos–and his muscles.

LA has enough Iranian-Americans in it that some have nicknamed it “Tehrangeles” (after Iran’s capital), but I can’t think of another film produced near there (Girl was actually filmed in Bakersfield) in which most (or all) of the cast is of Persian descent, but no one is a terrorist or a relic from the old country.  These characters speak Farsi to each other but, except for Arash’s father, with his drug addiction and collection of pre-revolutionary framed photos of family (complete with 60s-style teased hair on the women), these people aren’t living in the past–even The Girl’s retro record collection, clothes and bobbed hair reflect present-day fashion.

We can never know for sure, but just as with Black actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw giving two terrific, completely different star-turns in movies in one year but the media still largely ignoring her, I wonder if  Amirpour’s flawless visual sense, skill with actors and unique reworking of a genre many of us thought didn’t have an original angle left would garner more attention if she were a white guy. Girl is distributed in partnership with VICE‘s film arm and has even made some year-end, top-10 lists, but I had to go to New York to see it and whole countries (like Canada) have yet to get even limited distribution. Nevertheless Amirpour continues to work on films unimpeded. Her next work is about cannibals. I can’t wait until its release.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YGmTdo3vuY”]

___________________________________________________

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender