Festival film now an Oscar contender?

Iranian expatriate Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis graphic novel series (2000-2003) recounts her life to age 24, when she left Iran with her family's blessing for the last time and went to live in France (1994). Collaborating with her Paris studio-mate, cartoonist and video artist Vincent Paronnaud and a stellar French cast, Satrapi has successfully transferred her drawings and story to a 95-minute black-and-white animated film. Chiara Mastroianni is the voice for the adolescent and young adult Marjane; Chiara's real-life mother Catherine Deneuve does Marjane’s mother and veteran French star Danielle Darrieux is the voice of Marjane's feisty, outspoken, and totally irreverent grandmother. (An English-language version featuring Sean Penn, Iggy Pop, and Gena Rowlands apparently will be released later.) Word on the street is that this more handmade French animated film, now in selected US theaters, may give Pixar's slick Ratatouille a run for the Best Animation Oscar this year.

Satrapi, who told this story first in autobiographical comic strips that became best-selling books, grew up in a progressive ruling class Tehran family. An uncle went to Leningrad to study Marxism-Leninism. As a little girl she picked up the radicalism, and had some of her grandmother's genes for outspokenness. Shifting allegiances and roles quickly, she soon gave up supporting the Shah and walked around the house calling for revolution. She tried on ideas constantly, posing as a prophet, then a dictator. God and Karl Marx, whom she imagines appearing to her in her bedroom, vie with each other for her affections. Her communist uncle is hopeful that the revolution will grow democratic; but while he is imprisoned and tortured by CIA-trained jailers under the Shah, he is executed under the mullahs—whom, strangely, the narrator says little about. (Khomeini is not depicted.) All the girls must take the veil. But Marji, already an avid collector of bootleg heavy metal and punk tapes, remains an obstreperous girl who in class outspokenly challenges the pious lies of her chador-wearing teachers.

Iran's war with Iraq causes terrible disruption: the house next door is destroyed. For her safety in this desperate moment for the country (1983), Marji's parents send her to Vienna, where she attends a French school, as she has all her life. Though she eventually becomes part of a group of misfit students, Vienna is a lonely and difficult time for the girl. She grows up physically (which happens in seconds in the animation—the film's most eye-catching sequence) and enters love problems: first with a boy who turns out to be gay; then one who sleeps with another girl—a betrayal that makes her so despondent she becomes homeless and ill and almost dies. She returns to an Iran where the upper class is living a double life of secret alcohol parties and music. Attending university in Tehrean she meets a man named Reza and marries him--but the union is a mistake, which her grandmother cheerfully dismisses. "The first marriage is just practice," she says. A bored, doodling psychiatrist listens to her troubles, tells her she's depressed, and gives her some pills--which seem to make her more depressed.

Finally the time comes when Marjane is in effect ordered by her family to leave the country for her own good. She goes to France, where she has remained ever since. That's the end of the book and the film.

Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus was an avowed inspiration for Satrapi's work, as well as a French comics artist named David B., whose style she imitated at first. The collaboration with Paronnaud came about after they shared a studio.

The animated Persepolis received rave reviews in France and shared the Cannes festival Jury Prize with Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light. It premiered in the US at the New York Film Festival and is having a limited release in Us theaters starting Christmas Day.

The US’s newly hostile stand against Iran may spur wider Stateside interest in this film, which skillfully combines a young woman's coming of age story with contemporary political history. This remains, however, basically a child's and young adult's version of events, a kind of post-1970 Iranian History for Dummies. The viewpoint has obvious limitations as a depiction of the larger events that are so much a part of the story Satrapi tells. The film moreover adds nothing that wasn’t in the book other than a little more gray cross-hatching and in fact omits some day-to-day detail that make the original version specific. The film’s look too remains as bare-bones, as virtually style-neutral as the book’s. This is not to say Persepolis hasn't technical integrity, clarity of storytelling, and much charm (to which the actors make a major contribution); nonetheless viewers in search of a phantasmogoric visual banquet or a thoroughgoing picture of modern Iranian history may be left hungry for more.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.