At least I'm not a sexually confused narcissist !

This contains a review of Appropriate Behavior (2014) (@AppropriateFilm)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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7 March (25 March, image added)

This is a pretty sketchy account of the highly diverting Q&A that followed a preview screening of Appropriate Behavior (2014) (@AppropriateFilm) at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), on Thursday 5 March at 6.30 p.m.

And we had a great preview screening, @ICALondon, and buoyant Q&Aat @CamPicturehouse with @AppropriateFilm from @ DesiMakesMovies, too... !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 6, 2015

Jack Toye, marketing manager at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), kicked off with a couple of questions about the film’s reception and journey to the screen – in answering throughout, Desiree Akhavan (@DesiMakesMovies) was accompanied and assisted by the film’s producer / co-originator, Cecilia Frugiuele, and we gathered that, from the provision of the first draft of Appropriate Behavior (2014) (@AppropriateFilm), there had been a keen desire from the relevant quarters to fund the film and get it made.

As to the script, we learnt that there both is, and is not, a lot of Akhavan in the film – her feelings about relationships and life, but not the ones that she carefully chose to keep private to her, and that the scenarios are, although they are ones with which she can identify, largely not relating her own experiences*.

We learnt that Akhavan is, over and over, asked about being 'the next Lena Dunham' :

Do these people have functioning spectacles, as she is clearly the next Diane Keaton ?

In the audience part of the Q&A, @THEAGENTAPSLEY had felt obliged to dive in with the first question of Akhavan, having invited a ‘corrective’ round of applause to the seeming notion, imputed by Woman’s Hour, that her work might be pretentious [but Akhavan then gave us the precise context, which was more about precocity ?]. The applause sought, which was straightaway forthcoming, was predicated on whether people endorsed the view of Appropriate Behavior that is contained in this Tweet :

Seen at @CamPicturehouse (Appropriate Behavior (2014) *and* Desiree Akhavan) - inventive & thoughtful, funny & moving pic.twitter.com/WmTSjJ4Zqf
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 5, 2015

For, to slip into reviewing the film a little more, it melds moods in a way that feels utterly natural, and shows what is essentially a grieving process for the loss of something dear : we all know what it is like, if we reach back into our painful pasts, when what has made us feel really bad will not stay shut away in our memory, but insists on breaking back in (as Freud – still an enormous favourite in film circles [if not in therapy-rooms ?] – would say, in our dreams, in our speech, in our hang-ups and inhibitions…). So, this is a film that is assuredly more interestingly engaged with sex than the unwatched Fifty Shades (or, for that matter, the unduly contorted, hysterical even, Volume I (and then Volume II besides) of Nymphomaniac (2013)), where a casual Internet date, fuelled by booze and hints of bondage, takes Shirin (Akhavan) away to a pivotal moment of closeness with Maxine (Rebecca Henderson).

No exact parallels here with, say, Diane Keaton dressing, in Annie Hall (1977) – and to devastating effect – in waistcoat and tie to Woody Allen’s more baggy appearance, at times less masculine than rather androgynous, but Akhavan readily acknowledged, at The Agent’s talking of finding echoes with Allen’s work from this period, that Frugiuele and she had been looking at this precedent for a relationship.

Forgetting whether, in Appropriate Behavior, Akhavan also referenced the way that Allen elsewhere shows us T. S. Eliot’s mixing / memory and desire, though never quite, as twenty years later, as sustainedly, disjunctively and disquietingly as in Deconstructing Harry (1997)**, she also accepted the compliment of comparison with Frances Ha (2012), the realization of whose existence in production, she admitted, gave Frugiuele and her momentary pause.

Though, as becomes quite clear, Frances and Shirin are very different, even if superficially similar in some ways, because – the clue is in the title – the latter’s actions are appropriate, appropriate to someone grieving. And 'we go', rather, to somewhere like the sense of loss in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) (or even that of C. S. Lewis for Joy Gresham in Shadowlands (1993), a treatment, in part [and before even being a play after his death], of Lewis’ moving account of his changing feelings and thoughts in A Grief Observed ?) : joke though Frances (Greta Gerwig) and Sophie (Mickey Sumner) might about their inseparability, they are friends, never lovers (or a couple), and what separates them is far more about independence, and Frances not being ready to do what Sophie seeks (and tries).

All of which was offered by way of compliment - thanks, @CamPicturehouse @DesiMakesMovies @AppropriateFilm, for a great event / screening !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 5, 2015

Importantly, also, Frances has 'issues' that Shirin patently does not (not to be taken for life [and its 'rules' ?] being as confusing for Shirin as it is for Annie (Keaton) and for Alvy*** (Allen)…). Shirin may, though, be a little immature, and so she chooses and delights in seducing Maxine, when first meeting her (and by using flattery outrageously effectively - as we see her put other learnt moves to use elsewhere), on the basis of a quality that, later, she comes to regret [devalue ? denigrate ?] in her, almost throwing that chat-up line in (her own and) Maxine's face (Maxine, contrariwise, has come to resent that aspect of Shirin that is her quick wit and charm...).


And just finally, although the question of coming out, and when (and to whom)****, is one that obviously pressurizes the relationship, too, in Warmest Colour, might there not also be a little hint here – quite off on a tangent – of Asia Argento, dramatizing her life to us, and to herself, in Scarlet Diva (2000) [as Anna Battista] ? :

Akhavan, though, is too savvy to make the moods of Appropriate Behavior any more than appropriate, a mix of the appropriacy of laughter and tears, and much awkwardness and anxiety – and it is Maxine’s quick and ready confession of social anxiety that, perhaps more than we credit it at the time, underlies forging a relationship with Shirin.


Possibly more on the Q&A, and on a much-needed rewatching, to come…


End-notes

* What was less clear, in Frugiuele’s and her eager desire to give T-shirts to the audience – as happened at various junctures, with a number of different, but largely sexually related questions – was whether Akhavan was telling us that she was comparing notes about having had, and what it was like successfully to have had, a threesome, or just curious : nonetheless, the answer from the representative of Queers in Shorts pleased her, that his partner and he had sought to be mindful of [not his exact words] the third person's needs.

** Excepting, of course, the contemporarily unfairly and unwisely critically reviled Stardust Memories (1980), particularly in the splintered account of the hospitalized Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling).

*** A mimesis in the names, even, though we probably do not actually hear them sounded in the same utterance.

**** On which, Akhavan was candid about herself.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)