Love Iranian-American Style (2006)

Sub-Genres - Biography, Race & Ethnicity  |   Run Time - 63 min.  |   Countries - United States  |   MPAA Rating - NR
  • AllMovie Rating
  • User Ratings (0)
  • Your Rating

Share on

Synopsis by Nathan Southern

Director Tanaz Eshaghian's Love Iranian-American Style provides a dryly funny, self-reflexive, first-person account of the documentarian's struggles with the prospects of dating and marriage, as she hits the age of 25. As an Iranian-Jewish-American who lives with her single mother, Eshagian has traditionally restricted her dating patterns to Caucasian men, but the pivotal birthday arrives and sends her mother into a panic; she thus avows to set Tanaz up in a traditional arranged marriage with an Iranian groom. Tanaz agrees - barely - and thus embarks on a series of dates with prospective candidates for the "big M." Her technique consists of setting the suitors up in one-on-one, on-camera interviews, in which she asks them, point blank, to espouse their feelings about dating and marriage, leading to a series of brutally honest and occasionally hilarious confessions. Eshagian also unearths old boyfriends and films them expostulating on why they broke up with her. On another level, the film sees the director plunging, headfirst, into a cultural abyss as she attempts to define herself via ethnic identity - and finds herself being torn, sharply, between the Iranian ideal of a fixed, long term union and the distinctly American tendencies to play the field and test the waters before committing.

Characteristics

Keywords

blind-date, cultural-identity, incentive, panic, self-reflection, suitor