Recently chosen as the closing film for the prestigious New York Film Festival, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, is, in the words of festival director Richard Pena, “a truly expressive work of art” where “you feel the writer is baring her soul.” If you haven’t already seen it, this summer sleeper hit is worth a look.
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is a black and white animated film, based on her books, that tells the story of modern-day Iran through the funny-sad eyes of a little girl, also named Marjane. If you’re like me and you read headlines about nuclear weapons and threats of war between the US and Iran with only a fuzzy understanding of the country’s recent history, then this beautiful and humorous film with its sometimes dreamy imagery is for you.
With Marjane as our narrator, a feisty and rebellious little girl growing up in the 1970s in Tehran, Persepolis outlines the broad strokes of the cultural revolution, toppling of the shah and subsequent regime under the Ayatollah, which Iranian people fought and were subject to, through the simplified and universal perspective of kids playing at being the tyrants and martyrs of war.
Marjane is thrilled to learn that “papy” was a prince and columnist and envies the little girl whose dad is a hero for having spent time in jail. After overhearing her parents talk about torture, Marjane proceeds to lead her friends in a game which involves hunting down the kid whose father is rumored to be responsible for multiple murders, with the purpose of bludgeoning his eyes with nails. Luckily her mom stops them in their tracks.
I won’t give too much more of the film’s plot away except to say that Marjane eventually gets sent away to Vienna to live a life free of Iran’s particular brand of oppression, only to experience adolescence in Europe through the eyes of an outsider. Persepolis’ success as a political fable is in telling the story of Iran, as it unfolds around the life of Marjane and showing us how these political realities affect everything from what she wears, to how she parties to her decision to marry at 21.
As the film progresses, we watch how in time, our heroine full of fire, slowly becomes a little sadder, a little more submissive. Persepolis is full of philosophical truths expressed in their clearest simplicity. As our narrator tells it, when the Iraq-Iran war is over, the Iranian people are so focused on being happy, they forget that they are not free.
This is, of course, the story of one woman. Marjane Satrapi is an educated, bourgeois Iranian who had the opportunity to leave Iran f0r Europe, return and leave again, to ultimately settle in France. Perhaps it is her status as an outsider in both Iranian and European cultures thats gives her the ability to tell a story so easy to identify with. Go see it.
This article was published Tuesday, August 21, 2007.
