What a panoramic, impressionistic and surrealistic journey is Vincent Paronanaud and Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” a poignant coming-of age story of an Iranian girl experiencing the tumultuous changes in her country and abroad. Shot in mostly a deceptively simple black and white animation (with occasional colorful images), the film traces Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical beginning with the Iranian Revolution through the 1980s.
The viewer is left in a hypnotic daze watching this kaleidoscopic, even Dali-esque whirlwind portrait. Despite the dense and serious undercurrents of an Iranian conflicted by her country’s regimented structure (and her oft- “Western” influences), the film works as animation since it seeks to be both true to the graphic novel approach as well as satirizing the very nature of government as merely comical.
Marjane is a precocious tomboy with a vivid imagination aspiring to be Bruce Lee. In between playing with her friends and making grandiose plans for her future, she learns from her middle-class, politically active family about the Shah’s autocratic regime. The black-and-white animation is befitting since it depicts how an outmoded, perhaps archaic nature of a country that is so medieval and dictatorial can be so difficult for a young, spirited girl. Brilliantly spliced within the film is her obvious love for the “West” with songs by Iron Maiden, even “Eye of the Tiger.” One sequence involving a depiction of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s with an Iron Maiden song bellowing in the background might be homage to ”Forrest Gump” with Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower,” suggesting the absurdity of war and chaos.
The anchor of the film, and Marjane, is her grandmother, voiced by Danielle Darrieux, who continually inspires her granddaughter to live a wholesome and free-spirited life. In an unlikely parallel the grandmother resembles Laurence Fishburne’s Jason Styles in “Boyz in the Hood,” the father of Tre, who warns his son of the dangers and travails of living on the worst streets of L.A. He is the anchor figure for his son in much the same way as Marjane’s encouraging grandmother. Marjane is convinced to ask for more out of life knowing there is a liberated world outside of Iran.
Persepolis is a wry film that is just as revealing as it is thrilling. It is hard to conceive of a more inventive mode of storytelling, perhaps comparable (though different media) to the graphic novel, “Maus: a Survivor’s Tale” by Art Spiegelman. In that story, Spiegelman recounts the struggle of his father to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew, drawing largely on his father’s recollections of his experiences. It depicts the effects of war felt through generations of a family, as the Jews are depicted as mice and Nazis as cats, Americans as dogs, and so forth. Steven Spielberg once said the hardest aspect of making ‘Schindler’s List’ was that he had to “explain the ineffable” — that is why the absurdity of the graphic novel “Maus” works so well and clearly so does “Persepolis.” It is remarkably inventive and captivating in its allegorical depiction of repressive Iran. It serves as a visual study-aid, clearly surrealistic in its ability to bring up images from the subconscious. Marjane’s journey is continually juxtaposed, reformed and even metamorphosed to fit the plotline.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 5, 2008. Read the original PDF.