Let nobody say writer-director Maryam Keshavarz doesn’t know how to start a movie.
The first time we see Leila, her alter ego in the autobiographical, warm-hearted, personal, funny but also somewhat chaotic “The Persian Version,” she's walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Headed to a Halloween party, she’s carrying a surfboard and wearing what she calls a “burkini” — a sexy bikini, but paired with a niqab, the face-covering garment worn by some Muslim women.
It’s surely not an accident that Leila is crossing a bridge, because her film (and Halloween costume) is about bridging two identities — her Iranian heritage, and her American life. Leila (an engaging Layla Mohammadi) is a New York born-and-raised aspiring screenwriter (she wants to be an Iranian Martin Scorsese) who, we learn, has never been fully comfortable in either world. American kids would call her names at school; Iranians saw her as too Americanized.
