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 he
movie Maryam
explores familiar territory — what it's like to be an American
high-school girl dealing with the demands of popularity in general
and dating in particular, and the often less-than-reasonable demands
made by parents. But it tackles this universal predicament in a
very crisply drawn particular situation: It's 1979, the U.S. and
Iran are at daggers drawn — and our young heroine is an Iranian-American.
Maryam is a
winsome youth, well incarnated by the sweet Mariam Parris, and it's
hard not to sympathize with her. She is the epitome of assimilation,
rebelling modestly against the strictures of her parents. Her cousin
Ali, a fanatical supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini, comes to the
U.S. to study — and disapproves of Maryam's American easygoingness
even more than her parents do. Ali is played by David Ackert with
a fascinating combination of brooding intensity and kindhearted
vulnerability — far from the stereotype of the religious fanatic
one finds in lesser movies.
Maryam's coming-of-age
story is also an analogy for America and the meaning of assimilation.
In the process of growing up — just as in the process of becoming
American — earlier authorities must be overthrown, and a new
sense of self established; but the highest values and insights of
the earlier authorities will remain, interiorized in the mature
person. Maryam will grow up to be a bourgeois individualist and
thorough suburbanite; but she will not despise her roots, nor her
family members who still abide by the earlier codes.
The atmosphere
of the late 1970s, too, is convincingly recreated — just one
of the many pleasures of this fine, insightful drama
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