Ava

Ava

These days, the word universal gets thrown around a lot when it comes to talking about movies. But there are moments in “Ava,” the contemporary Iranian coming of age story from writer/director Sadaf Foroughi, that feel so familiar so recognizable on an emotional level that universal really does seem like the only word for it.

In those loose and emotionally resonant scenes, you could almost be watching a high-school movie by Amy Heckerling: Ava (the excellent Mahour Jabbari) and her friends casually squabble about their lives and their parents and their crushes in the way teenagers always do, no matter where they are or what’s happening around them politically. But then Foroughi drops in the outside forces; she takes time to show us the strict codes and traditions these girls are up against.

You realize eventually that even though they might have been able to carve out pockets of daily camaraderie daily sanity within themselves, as young people tend to do under such circumstances, all that beating can break down even the bravest of spirits.

“Ava” wants more than this its title character too often feels frustratingly vague, frustratingly remote (despite Jabbari’s passionate performance) as written; it’d be nice to know more about her but still: It is refreshing that Foroughi’s film doesn’t merely set up tradition-vs-modernity as its central conflict.

Instead, she takes an early opportunity to establish Ava’s main conflict with her strong willed mother during their daily drive to school; we begin to see things from both sides of this mother-daughter battle (one of many never-ending battles between Bahar Noohian’s overprotective Bahar and Jabbari’s increasingly self-destructive Ava).

Bahar objects to her daughter’s musical aspirations (she plays violin), keeps tight reins on her friends and out-of-school activities with them; Bahar’s a doctor, restless and generally exhausted from working around the clock, and she wants to see Ava get out of the car and into the school without lingering with her friends on the sidewalk in front of prying eyes. This is understandable.

But it only gets worse from there.

That’s Ava (Mahour Jabbari) misbehaving against her mother and the school’s increasingly tyrannical headmistress Ms. Dehkhoda (Leili Rashidi, hair-raisingly good), in a film that takes a distinctly serious turn at this point. Briefly, the only sympathetic, semi-modern character Foroughi allows Ava is her dad (Vahid Aghapour). But while Bahar seems entirely to blame for Ava’s spiraling troubles she never stops nagging her daughter or anyone else around her Foroughi doesn’t make it easy for us to write Bahar off completely either.

Because she too grew up in and remains stuck within the same oppressive society, where she’s usually left alone to care for Ava by an equally overworked husband, Bahar personifies her culture’s impossible demands upon women: We may halfway understand where she’s coming from when stakes get high even if we don’t condone it. The rest of Foroughi’s side characters, including Ava’s best friend Melody and her divorced mom, are similarly viewed from multiple angles; these aren’t necessarily stories about villains so much as individuals systematically let down or warped by villainous patriarchal systems.

Authenticity hangs heavy over “Ava,” which indeed draws on some of director-writer Sadaf Foroughi’s own experiences growing up in a repressive culture though shot with a painterly sensitivity by DP Sina Kermanizadeh, this first feature leaves something to be desired in terms of tidiness or emotional impact through its final act. It may lack the rousing highs of comparably themed titles like “Wadjda” and “Mustang,” but nevertheless puts its sharp eyed maker solidly on the map.

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