The Academy Award nominees for Best Animated Feature this year are Surf’s Up, Ratatouille, and Marjane Satrapi’s extraordinary Persepolis, which is being shown for a week at the Fountain Theatre starting Friday evening.
Persepolis is not like any animated film I’ve ever seen, intentionally two-dimensional, largely black and white, with a visual style Carrie Rickey of the Philadelphia Inquirer aptly described as "Betty and Veronica Meet Matisse." For those of us who might think the computer-generated imagery of "Ratatouille" is as sophisticated as animation can get, Persepolis takes us back to pen and ink with humor and a punk attitude.
Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels about her childhood and adolescence in Iran and Europe are internationally popular, and now she and Vincent Paronnaud have brought them to the big screen. The cartoon memoirs are also available in a new paperback edition from Pantheon [The Complete Persepolis, $24.95].
Satrapi was born in Iran in 1969, and grew up in Tehran. The film begins with the first of several color sequences of Marjane as an adult sitting in Orly Airport in Paris, smoking and thinking. The flashbacks begin in 1978, just before the revolution which overthrew the shah.
Young Marjane is the only child of affluent, leftist parents, and our heroine spends her evenings having conversations with God and Karl Marx. At school she "learns" what a great leader Iran has, then at home she marches around the living room chanting "Death to the Shah!"
In her own mind, this girl is a prophet and a revolutionary, and Satrapi’s portrayal of herself is affectionate and bemused. The historical events which punctuate the story, the Islamic revolution and the war with Iraq, are seen and experienced through Marjane’s eyes and heart. She is the vivacious, often funny narrative device that guides us through some dark history.
Even as a youngster, Marjane is a born rebel, and her adolescence coincides with the repression that followed the fall of the shah. The veil plays a large part in this story, and in one sequence, Marjane asks the theocratic purists why the boys at school can dress provocatively if the purpose of the veil is to keep everyone’s eyes to themselves.
This rebel with a cause is aided by her grandmother, full of life and solid advice, and by a series of friends and relatives who suffer political repression, first from the shah’s regime, then from the revolutionaries. Marjane’s parents send her to Europe for a safe, humanistic education, an experience which clarifies for her that freedom comes with its own hardships, and that she will always be Iranian.
Aside from a quietly moving score by Olivier Bernet, what makes Persopolis come to life are the singular voices, Chiara Mastroianni as Marjane, Catherine Deneuve [Mastroianni’s mother] as Marjane’s mother, and Danielle Darrieux as Marjane’s grandmother. An English-language version is reportedly being prepared for home video release sometime in May, but this week offers an opportunity to see the original French language version with subtitles.
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