Sunday, January 27, 2008
A+E, Movies, Reviews
Drawn from real life
Animated ‘Persepolis’ explores chaotic Iranian upbringing
CREDIT: Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
“PERSEPOLIS”
Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve
Directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi
Rated PG-13
Landmark Midtown Art Cinema
By Steve Murray
When we meet her in 1978, little Marjane is an exuberant 9-year-old with a love of Bruce Lee movies and Adidas sneakers. When protesters swarm the streets outside her home, she views it as just another of life’s colorful parades. In fact, it’s the start of the Iranian Revolution, which will send the Shah into exile and—in theory, anyway—usher in an enlightened republic in place of a monarchy.
Based on Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels, “Persepolis” shows instead the onset of fundamentalism and cultural paranoia that ultimately sent the author herself into exile, stranded between Iran’s suffocating repression and the destabilizing freedoms of Europe.
Co-directed by Satrapi, the animated “Persepolis” emulates the look of her artwork. Largely black-and-white, the images alternately resemble woodblocks or the fluid, spare lines of Asian watercolors. The effect is engagingly childlike, serving a bleakly adult story. But the movie has plenty of humor in its view of a world turned upside down, in which former window washers are given jobs of authority, while professionals and intellectuals are viewed with suspicion at best, and are sometimes jailed and executed. (Marjane’s beloved uncle is one of the early casualties.)
We watch as Marjane, her intelligent parents and beloved grandmother cope with their country’s stringent new rules. Women are forced to shroud themselves in burkas and listen to such Orwellian Newspeak jargon as, “The veil stands for freedom.” Police can arrest anyone for any reason, and homes are subject to unannounced searches for illegal contraband, like wine and rock ’n’ roll music.
When the adolescent Marjane starts challenging the new status quo, her parents send her to boarding school in Vienna, where she falls in with bohemian European students and experiences the joys and heartaches of first love. “Persepolis” then follows Marjane back to Iran as a young adult, as she sleepwalks into and out of marriage to a perfectly nice man with whom she shares nothing in common.
The problem is, the older Marjane gets, the less interesting she becomes. The movie, no longer a child’s-eye-view of cultural upheaval, starts to reflect too closely its character’s emotional doldrums. It overstays its welcome.
Still, “Persepolis” is often a wry and an enlightening look at a nation that follows rules very different from our own—a frightening world in which the best way for a mother to express love for her daughter is to send the girl out of her homeland, saying, “I forbid you to come back.” 3 STARS
SIDEBAR/BOX:
HED: A PERSEPOLIS PRIMER
PHOTOS: Persepolis Book 1, Persepolis Book 2, Complete Persepolis
The narrative of “Persepolis” draws from Satrapi’s four graphic novels, which each cover a particular period in the writer/artist’s life.
The U.S. versions of “Persepolis,” published by Pantheon, condense the four books into two volumes. “The Complete Persepolis,” a movie tie-in, gathers all four installments into one book.
“Persepolis” the movie is filmed in French, with English subtitles.