The Persian Version (2023) : A Family Saga with Too Many Chapters and One Saving Grace (SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL)

 

There is no denying that The Persian Version is made with passion. You can feel it in every frame, in every needle drop, in every piece of narration that spills over into the next timeline. It is deeply personal, unapologetically loud, and bursting with cultural specificity. And yet, as much as I admire its ambition, I cannot ignore how wildly uneven the experience is.

You know those movies that clearly have so much love behind them that it almost does not matter if everything else is a mess. That is how I feel about this film. It is disjointed, tonally all over the place, and relies far too heavily on narration. But I still appreciate the journey it attempts to take us on. It just takes some serious sifting through the clutter to get there.

The story centers on Leila, an Iranian American woman in New York who is perpetually at odds with her formidable mother. When her father faces a major health crisis, the extended family gathers, secrets surface, and the narrative begins to spiral across decades. We move from present day New York to revolutionary era Iran, from childhood escapades to adult misadventures, from queer love stories to sibling chaos. There are eight brothers, a grandmother with her own voice, and flashbacks nested inside other flashbacks.

At times it feels like a television season crammed into a single feature. The film barely moves forward and yet somehow manages to pack in an overwhelming amount of backstory. We jump between narrators, perspectives, and eras so frequently that I often found myself reorienting instead of feeling. Wait, where are we now. Oh, right. Different decade. Different actor. Different emotional temperature.

And that is where the tonal imbalance becomes a real issue. Sometimes I was fully on board with these characters on their journey. Other times I genuinely wished I could get down at the next stop. The shifts between heightened comedy, earnest melodrama, cultural satire, and heartfelt reconciliation are so abrupt that the emotional beats rarely land the way they are intended to. The film tries to be wacky culture clash comedy, generational immigrant epic, queer coming of age story, and mother daughter reckoning all at once. It is admirable. It is also exhausting.

There is a significant amount of heart here, but unfortunately I do not think Keshavarz had enough distance to leave any of it on the editing room floor. It is clearly a very personal story about identity, migration, and family myth making. But sometimes when you love every chapter of your own history, you forget that a film needs focus. The extended flashbacks are beautifully staged and often touching, yet they stall momentum rather than deepen it. The constant breaking of the fourth wall, with characters speaking directly to us, creates distance at the exact moments when intimacy is needed.

And yet, despite all of that, I cannot dismiss it entirely. Because at its core is a powerful mother daughter conflict that truly resonates. The exploration of generational trauma, cultural expectation, and the gap between who we are and who our parents hoped we would be is compelling. When the film narrows its focus to that dynamic, it sings.

If not for the brilliance of Niousha Noor as the mother, this film would have fallen flat big time. She absolutely kills that ending. Her performance carries a gravity that the structure often lacks. There is steel in her gaze, regret in her silences, and vulnerability that finally cracks through in the final stretch. It is in those last minutes that the film finds clarity. My eyes welled up like balloons, not because everything before it worked, but because Noor grounds the chaos in something real.

Layla Mohammadi brings energy and charisma to Leila, even when the character is written in a way that makes connection difficult. The tension between them has bite. But P S, what if Niousha Noor’s character had been the true protagonist instead of the often frustrating daughter. I cannot help but feel we would have loved and connected with this movie far more deeply. The mother’s journey, her sacrifices, her inner life, that is where the emotional gold lies.

There are also moments of genuine fun. The dance sequences, including the Girls Just Want to Have Fun number, inject a burst of color and joy. The depiction of a large Iranian American family navigating life in New York feels vibrant and specific. We need more stories like this. More diverse voices. More cultural texture.

But even there, I found myself distracted. P P S, while watching this film, the Asian Indian in me kept whispering, why does everybody who is not Iranian look so fake in this film. There is something about the staging of certain supporting characters that feels exaggerated to the point of caricature. It adds to the tonal whiplash.

Ultimately, this is a difficult film to review because there is so much right about it and also too much of it. It feels like someone telling a story and getting so excited about every tangent that they forget the original point. A deeply personal vision told with an impressively unique voice, but one that desperately needed a more disciplined edit.

I wanted to love it. I respect it. I admire its ambition. But I left more bummed than delighted, even as those final moments tried their very best to win me back.