108 min | R | October 20, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics
Leila is a queer Iranian-American filmmaker who would rather do anything than become her mother. Maryam Keshavarz mines her own family for a generation-spanning comedy that crosses an ocean and forty years to prove the two women are the same person. It is overstuffed, and it earns the mess.
Leila is a queer Iranian-American woman who wants to make films and wants nothing to do with her mother. She has eight brothers, a father waiting on a heart transplant, and a one-night stand that turns into a complication she cannot explain to her family. Maryam Keshavarz builds the film out of her own biography and refuses to keep it tidy. The surface is a culture-clash comedy about a daughter who thinks she has escaped where she came from. The real subject is the discovery that her mother made the exact choices she is making now, decades earlier and at far greater cost.
Layla Mohammadi plays Leila with motormouth confidence that keeps cracking to show the fear underneath. She narrates her own life to the camera and tries to control a story that keeps escaping her. Niousha Noor plays Shireen, the mother, as a hard, calculating real-estate hustler who hands no one an easy explanation. Kamand Shafieisabet plays Young Shireen as a teenage bride in Iran, and the performance carries the film’s emotional turn. Bella Warda plays Mamanjoon, the grandmother, as the one person who sees both women clearly. Bijan Daneshmand plays Ali Reza, the ailing father, with a quiet that the loud family talks over.
Keshavarz writes and directs, and she structures the film as a relay. Leila narrates the first half. Then the film hands the narration to her mother’s teenage self and crosses to Iran for the back half. The editing braids New York and pre-revolution Iran until the two timelines rhyme. The score leans on eighties needle-drops, and a dance number set to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” carries the family across two countries and two generations at once. The direct address to camera keeps the comedy fast and the confessions disarming.
The film crams musical numbers, fourth-wall breaks, immigration history, a queer coming-out, and a marriage saga into one container. It overflows. Not every tonal jump lands, and the comedy sometimes undercuts the drama it has earned. The core holds anyway. When the film stops being about a daughter rebelling and becomes about two women who survived the same trap, it finds something true. Keshavarz makes a loud, generous film about how mothers and daughters inherit each other’s secrets without ever meaning to.