Queer History Month: Appropriate Behaviour

In honour of Queer History Month, MQUP would like to highlight the important books recently published in our Queer Film Classics series. This series aims to meet the diversity, quality, and originality of classics in the queer film canon, broadly conceived, with equally compelling writing and critical insight. Books in the series have much to teach us, not only about the art of film but about the queer ways in which films can transmit our meanings, our stories, and our dreams.

On a weekly basis, we will be sharing a blog post featuring an excerpt from a title in the QFC series, as well as clips from the movie in question.

Receive 30% off all Queer Film Classics titles using the code MQQH at check-out.

This week, we’re sharing an excerpt from the first chapter of Appropriate Behavior by Maria San Filippo

Premiering at Sundance in 2014, Desiree Akhavan’s acclaimed debut feature, Appropriate Behavior, introduced the indie film world to the deadpan, irreverent wit that had already won over fans of her trailblazing LGBTQ web series The Slope.

The first volume in the Queer Film Classics series to spotlight a work by and about a bisexual woman of colour, this book explores Appropriate Behavior as an instant classic of US indie filmmaking in the 2010s, as a radical reappropriation of straight and gay film genres, as an artist’s coming-of-age story, and as a model for feminist-queer creative collaboration. Less than a decade old, Appropriate Behavior captures an urban queer community imperilled by gentrification and homonormativity and serves as exemplar of an innovative wave of independent cinema not yet subsumed by the streaming economy. Maria San Filippo explores how filmmaker and film render a singular voice and story that queers not only its celebrated romcom predecessors but also the gay coming-out film and the lesbian romance alike. The book concludes with an interview with Akhavan.

Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_4vkIMb8_4

Here is a scene from the film, where Shirin goes lingerie shopping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6cY6x6op-g

Figure 1: Desiree Akhavan on the set of Appropriate Behavior, directing the (uncredited) young performer who plays Carrington, stone-faced son of hapless stoner dad Ken (Scott Adsit).

Instant Classic

The first question a reader of this volume may have is why a film released as recently as 2014 deserves recognition as a “Queer Film Classic,” no matter how queerly conceived. Answering that question gives me the immensely pleasurable task of tallying the reasons why a work that might seem too recent and in other ways too … inappropriate to achieve canonical status is so deserving. That I’m hardly alone in celebrating Appropriate Behavior and its defiantly bisexual, Iranian American creator Desiree Akhavan also makes my task easier. That the film was widely acclaimed upon release, and since, does not mean, however, that Akhavan’s triumph was accomplished easily or overnight. Taking a cue from Appropriate Behavior’s nonlinear exposition, I begin by retracing the circuitous path that Akhavan’s debut feature took to becoming a queer film classic.

Seeking to capitalize on the success of her attention-getting web series The Slope (2010–12) Akhavan’s first attempts to source funding from cultural non- profits fell flat; as she observed, “I just don’t think I fit the mould of what you want for your Persian grant, or your women’s grant or your gay grant.” (Al- camo 2014). This outcome suggests that Akhavan’s brand of work somehow falls in between the various identity categories around which nonprofit funding is organized. Appropriate Behavior would eventually be financed through private equity, which has become an increasingly essential resource for first- time filmmakers as the specialty divisions and independent distributors that had previously sustained indie filmmaking have disappeared. Once completed, Appropriate Behavior still needed to distinguish itself among the glut of indie films pouring into festival submission portals and streaming sites. Despite what one might judge its evident attractions to film festival programmers – an edgy comedy made by and starring a queer woman of colour and featuring sex, romance, and Brooklyn hipsters – Akhavan recalls having been rejected from thirty festivals with Appropriate Behavior (Wickham 2015). No wonder that the day she got the call from Sundance, after submitting a rough cut, seemed nothing short of miraculous. As she related, giddy with anticipation en route to Park City in January 2014, and calling upon an analogy that kids of the 1980s and ’90s will appreciate: “I don’t even know how to de- scribe it, because never in my life have I had a dream that came true. It was the equivalent to me of like … I’m trying to think of who I had a crush on in sixth grade. It would be like Jonathan Taylor Thomas giving you a phone call and being like ‘Hey babe, let’s do this, wanna be my girlfriend?’” (Ehrlich 2015). Programmed in Sundance’s next section devoted to “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling,” Appropriate Behavior’s world premiere garnered an audience award nomination and positive notices in the trades and festival reportage. “Remember the name Desiree Akhavan. You’re going to be hearing it a lot in the future.” So began the Washington Post’s review of Appropriate Behavior (Merry 2015). “Akhavan’s remarkable, near-perfect debut has wit and charisma to spare,” wrote Inkoo Kang (2015) in The Wrap.

Following its Sundance triumph, Appropriate Behavior received a Grand Jury Prize at the San Diego Asian Film Festival, a Tangerine Entertainment Juice Award (for emergent women feature filmmakers) at the Provincetown International Film Festival, and the award for Screenwriting in a US Dramatic Feature at Outfest Los Angeles, alongside several additional nominations for jury prizes and audience awards at festivals as far-flung and multi-faceted as the Glasgow Film Festival, the Off-Camera International Festival of Independent Cinema in Poland, and Queer Lisboa in Portugal. The film’s success at both identity-branded festivals and those programming a broader range of independent releases reflects Akhavan’s success at creating a work that engages LGBTQ+ as well as BIPOC audiences while also being capable of crossing over to a wider audience. Commissioned to write a piece for the Gotham Film and Media Institute’s (formerly IFP) website while in pre-production on Appropriate Behavior, Akhavan (2013) worried that her film would “end up premiering at the Hoboken Film Festival for Ambiguously Ethnic Women & The Gluten Intolerant and then be banished to the Gay & Lesbian section of Netflix.” Though her concerns proved unfounded, Akhavan’s snark here signals the solipsistic tendencies encouraged by the then-thriving if still circumscribed ecosystem of LGBTQ+-focused festivals and VOD sites like Buskfilms and QueerFrame.1

Staying aloft after a festival run has become increasingly challenging, given how few festival premieres result in theatrical distribution deals, even in an era when a limited release was still a reasonable aim for first-time filmmakers– though Akhavan found a different set of criteria applied to catapult her past the velvet rope that restricts indies clambering for theatrical exhibition. “On the indie film circuit and in the film festival world, it’s very attractive to be a gay, Iranian film,” observed Akhavan, “but then in the theatrical setting to get a distributor and a release, it’s not” (Alcamo 2014). What propelled the film forward was the accumulating buzz of festival accolades, critical praise, and word-of-mouth, sufficiently voluble by summer of 2014 to entice the indie distributor Gravitas Ventures to venture a US limited theatrical release, with a “day and date” deal for simultaneous online availability in January 2015 – just shy of a year after its Sundance debut. It was subsequently picked up for UK distribution by queer film specialist Peccadillo Pictures, and given a wide release there the following March. Though box office returns were modest, award nominations established the film as a succès d’estime: for “Best First Screenplay” at the Independent Spirit Awards (the indie Oscars, as it’s known) as well as for “Outstanding Film – Limited Release” at the GLAAD Media Awards, and Akhavan for “Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director” at the Gotham Awards. With these latter two commendations – the former doled out by the LGBTQ+ media watchdog not always known for finding the humour in the inappropriate (Akhavan’s signature), the latter named for the daring indie distributor of films like Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and Lost High- way (1997) – both film and filmmaker demonstrated an aptitude for, if I may reappropriate the expression, “going both ways.”

Having hovered in the high ninetieth percentile since its debut, at the time of this writing in 2021 Appropriate Behavior has a 95 per cent “Certified Fresh” rating on the Rotten Tomatoes critics’ metre. The film’s fandom cuts across categories of cultural identity, industry demographics, and taste preference to encompass, on one hand, cinephiles and (as Akhavan herself noted halfway through the film’s festival run) “30–45-year-old straight men” (Alcamo 2014), and on the other, queer folx and Millennials/Gen Z’ers. Appropriate Behavior’s broad appeal surely derives from its singular blend of being “audacious, funny and unique” – so anointed in the promotional endorsement provided by Lena Dunham, to whom Akhavan would immediately and repeatedly be compared.

To make an attention-grabbing independent first feature – in entertainment industry lingo, a “calling card” – in 2014 was a daunting prospect. Even as the much-ballyhooed digital revolution enabled ever more films to be made, the 2008 economic downturn and an emerging shift to streaming was shuttering those studio specialty divisions and boutique distributors that had previously enabled modestly budgeted, low-concept films to find audiences. By 2014, indie filmmaker-turned-industry sage Mark Duplass was likening the resulting free-for-all to Reaganomics: an ecosystem driven by low-cost technology and labour and deregulated distribution channels, but unmatched by the requisite number of consumers needed to offset saturation or a profit incentive for financiers to back mid-range films, thus creating an increasingly bifurcated structure of economic disparity between blockbusters and no-bud- gets (Duplass 2014). In a 2014 Salon piece titled “America’s Next Wal-Mart: The Indie Film Industry,” entertainment industry reporter Beanie Barnes ex- tended the Reaganomics metaphor, describing “an industry where steadily shrinking profits are privatized while growing costs/losses are increasingly socialized” (Barnes 2014). Like Duplass, Barnes was an early predictor of what has now come to pass: an oligopolistic structure wherein a few “big box” con- tent providers control access to and reap most of the profit from the plethora of films and shows whose creators take on increasing amounts of risk and debt for decreasing possibilities of payoff.

Less than a year after Appropriate Behavior’s premiere, Duplass used his keynote address at the 2015 South by Southwest Film Festival to put a positive spin on the transition then underway: “As the death of the middle class of film has happened, it has been rebirthed in television. The way you used to make really awesome $5 million movies that didn’t have movie stars in them and had really great, cool original content, that’s happening in cable TV right now” (Bakare 2015). By the following summer, the proliferation of television channels developing original content led FX Networks chairman John Langraf, addressing the Television Critics Association on their summer press tour, to his famous proclamation of the industry having reached a quantity and quality highpoint: “Peak TV.” As it turns out, the summit was still a ways off, as the number of scripted series continued to climb into 2020; only the covid-19 pandemic put the (perhaps temporary) brakes on the proliferation of content.

Against these odds, and shouldering grad school debt and New York City rent, Akhavan stuck to the feature film route when so much start-up funding was being siphoned off into series television, then found a foothold on a path overcrowded with aspiring auteurs awakening to the reality that, as Duplass warned at the start of his sxsw keynote, “The cavalry isn’t coming.” Commit- ting to feature filmmaking without significant financial backing mandated a microbudget (well below the $5 million “middle class” marker), a cast devoid of marquee talent, and when it came time to mount a publicity campaign, a premise provocative enough to cut through the clutter; Appropriate Behavior had all three. Modestly budgeted, the film was shot on location in Brooklyn featuring an eclectic ensemble, corralled by casting director Allison Twardziak, of recognizable (but far from household name) New York–based actors – and some non-actors – who deliver pitch-perfect performances. Yet the irrepressible frontwoman was the “triple threat” writer-director-actor Akhavan, who had already learned the value of provocative self-branding.

1 For more on LGBTQ+ festivals, see Richards (2017). For a discussion of digital distribution of sapphic-themed films circa 2014, see Beirne (2014, 129–38).