Shirin in Love movie review & film summary (2014)

The statistics this article marshals are fairly astonishing, especially since no one argues that audiences are no longer are interested in romance explored in comic form. The genre's decimation rather has to do with the current cultures, prejudices and economic strategies of the major studios. Yet as Nicholson notes, "Bold changes come from vacuums. We're seeing it happen now. If the major studios won't make romantic comedies, independent companies will."

Certainly, indie filmmakers like Ramin Niami will. Though "Shirin in Love" isn't likely to duplicate the flukish success of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," the most successful indie rom-com of all time, it ventures into the Hollywood vacuum with a similar blend of ethnic specificity and classic romantic comedy narrative strategies.

Its eponymous heroine, Shirin (Nazanin Boniadi) is a pretty mid-twentysomething struggling to escape the plush nest of her successful immigrant parents. A bumbling ditz in the tradition of Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn, she's finished law school but decided she wants to be a book critic. Unfortunately the one outlet she has as a novice writer is a glossy Beverly Hills magazine published by her mother, Maryam (Anahita Kalatbari), a sculpted, peroxided, Type-A embodiment of the controlling Persian mother.

Not only does Maryam want to keep Shirin's work life under her sights—you get the feeling she's only temporarily indulging her daughter's writerly ambitions—but she also keeps nudging her toward marriage with her longtime boyfriend, Mike (Maz Jobrani), a successful plastic surgeon who has been friends with Shirin's family for years.

No wonder that Shirin acts out, as when, in a luxe party thrown by Maryam and attended mainly other Iranian-American professionals including Mike, she gets roaring drunk and has to be rescued by one of the few non-Iranian guests, William (Riley Smith). The wheels of destiny are set in motion by this encounter, but Shirin blacks out the evening sufficiently that she doesn't remember the guy when she meets him a second time. This happens when she drives up to northern California to interview a reclusive writer named Rachel Harson (Amy Madigan) and finds that she has a handsome son named William.