Girls Behaving Badly: Desiree Akhavan on Appropriate Behaviour

“I find your anger incredibly sexy – I hate so many things too,” Shirin (Desiree Akhavan) deadpans when first meeting her soon-to-be girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson). Shirin’s attempts at flirting are as awkward and misguided as nearly everything else she does in Appropriate Behaviour, but her guileless need to please can’t help but charm. Whether angrily and very publicly brandishing a strap-on (in her hands, that is) or spending a blind date boozing out of paper bags in the Brooklyn streets, Shirin’s life is laid bare emotionally and physically. (She’s so plainly spoken that before roleplay she suggests to Maxine that they make their safe word “safe word” to avoid any misunderstandings.) It could be said that Shirin is open to a fault – except when it comes to revealing her bisexuality to her Iranian immigrant parents.

“She’s incapable of being anything but genuine,” says writer-director Akhavan, who makes her feature debut after the cult success of online web series The Slope, which she co-created with ex-partner Ingrid Jungermann. “The title was a commentary on all these different subcultures she belongs to, the many identities of what it means to be a child of immigrants, or queer, or in New York even. To me, each one of those identities has their own very strict set of rules, of what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate. The character of Shirin is someone who is incapable of being appropriate in any setting she finds herself in.” Disingenuous is a word that pops up often during our conversation, and it’s obvious that Akhavan considers it a dirty one. Still, Shirin’s (and Akhavan’s) self-effacing, almost kittenish vulnerability mitigates her inappropriate, at times painfully blunt attitude. In Appropriate Behaviour, Akhavan strikes the perfect comic balance between cheeky and needy without ever seeming precious or posed.

The film’s storyline – which follows Shirin’s attempts to deal with an overbearing family and win back Maxine while tracing the arc of their relationship through flashbacks – bears more than a passing similarity to Akhavan’s own life. While writing the screenplay, she was dealing with a break-up and the aftermath of having come out to her family. Akhavan is herself the daughter of Iranian immigrants and openly bisexual, two pivotal facets of her life she rarely sees depicted onscreen. “Just the very fact that I’m an out bisexual and Iranian is completely inappropriate,” she says, insisting there’s a unique “neither here nor there” stigma attached to being bisexual. “We have depictions of gay couples and gay life and what it is to be gay, but that’s a very clear-cut division in the sand, you know? Gay people feel the way you feel about the opposite sex but with the same sex. [Bisexuality] is in the messy grey area. There’s also this weird implication of cheating and lying.” As for Iranian portrayals in Hollywood, she’s even more disheartened. “There are very few depictions of Iranians, period. It’s like, Argo and Not Without My Daughter.”

Despite the film’s autobiographical elements, she insists that it doesn’t amount to simply a “diary entry”. “I wanted to explore these issues that felt so specific to me and do it in a way that could potentially be universal,” she says, “and to do that effectively I didn’t want to make something that was so clearly my experience.” A bittersweet relationship comedy at its core, Appropriate Behaviour treads familiar territory, but its universal feel isn’t won by sacrificing character and moment specificity; from incredibly awkward sexual hook-ups to weed-induced, stream-of-consciousness conversations played against the backdrop of falling in love, the film hones in on small, emotionally charged moments even in the midst of near-absurdity. A young, Brooklyn-based female filmmaker with a sexually frank outlook, Akhavan is often compared to Lena Dunham. To make the idea even more tempting, she recently appeared in episodes of Girls after Dunham and co-creator Jenni Konner saw and liked Appropriate Behaviour.

“I find it flattering, but I also think it’s incredibly lazy,” she says of the comparison. “I understand how people sell papers or get clicks online. Everyone wants to read something that says ‘Lena Dunham’ in the title. So it’s very cheap, and it sucks, especially since it’s inherently sexist and has this weird implication. Because it’s not just me, it’s every female filmmaker right now making honest work,” she says, pointing to Gillian Robespierre, the director of 2014’s Obvious Child, Zero Motivation (2014) director Talya Lavie and U.S. television series Broad City. “Every young woman doing something outside the norm of the Hollywood system is the next Lena Dunham. That does have the implication that there’s only space for one funny woman whose work can be monetised. So there’s a threat behind it.” Still, despite offering a very different perspective than Dunham (queer and non-white, for starters) she concedes to some of the reasoning behind it. “I live and work in Brooklyn, I’m comedic, I star in the work I direct and write. Yes, I see that.”

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“In the tiny indie world there are so many powerful women” – Desiree Akhavan

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Media bias or no, Akhavan is excited about the changing, increasingly positive attitudes to female sexuality and to women making their own work, at least in the world of independent film. “In the tiny indie world there are so many powerful women. The majority of the accolades and the best films I’ve seen this past year from first-time directors were from female directors,” she says. When asked why she thinks it’s so difficult for women to transition from the indie world to become major players, she is circumspect. “Most first features are independent. Most first-time filmmakers do work in a bubble because no one’s going to take a multi-million dollar risk—I mean, people do, but it’s rare. So it’s a transitional leap that’s very hard to make, and I have no idea what it takes because I’m not there yet.” (Akhavan’s film was funded through private equity secured in the UK.) Currently she’s taking a different route to success, in a medium that’s recently proven much more receptive to telling substantive stories by and about women, by pitching a small-screen comedy about a “lesbian-identified woman who comes out as bisexual and starts dating men for the first time in her thirties.”

“First and foremost I want to make work that is really funny and entertaining,” she says, “but I also really don’t give a shit unless [it] has something cutting beneath the surface.” She regularly tackles taboo subjects within the queer community, such as internalised homophobia, power dynamics in queer relationships, trans men versus butch lesbians, and lesbians who start playing for the other team. The tagline for The Slope, a hilariously irreverent takedown of queer Brooklyn hipsters, is “superficial, homophobic lesbians”; one of the shorts even features a scathing parody of the near-universally beloved ‘It Gets Better’ anti-suicide campaign. (“Don’t kill yourself,” Akhavan counsels, “because suicide is super gay.”)

That brashness, though it may be intrinsic to Akhavan’s button-pushing proclivities, feels a little toned down in Appropriate Behaviour – likely a nod to her desire for broader appeal. But there’s still plenty of the blissfully bitter mixed in with the sweet. Ultimately, Akhavan says, she’s interested in redefining the parameters of what’s acceptable: “The more people who come out, the more people who demand respect for themselves, the more the culture bends to them,” she insists. Her beguilingly awkward take on boundary pushing certainly demands respect, even as her fumbling, funny alter ego suffers from a lack of it.

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