A minimalist animation sheds light on the muddle of modern Iran
Persepolis (12A)
dirs: Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi
Even the best cinema adaptations of graphic novels, such as American Splendour, Ghost World or Ping Pong, have eschewed their pen-and-ink origins in favour of flesh and blood. But the new animated feature of Persepolis, about an Iranian girl growing up during the 1979 revolution, succeeds precisely because it retains the faux-naïf drawing style of the book's author (and main character), Marjane Satrapi, who also co-wrote and co-directed the picture.
The animation is elegantly childlike, comprised of simple black lines, or blocks of inky darkness inflected with white detail (for example, the silhouetted gas masks with two lunar circles for eyes). Satrapi and her co-director, Vincent Paronnaud, make a little go a long way - the dots of snow falling on a sooty Tehran landscape show that you don't need to be David Lean to conjure an evocative sense of place.
There's something satisfying, too, about the use of monochromatic, near-minimalist animation to describe a subject as messy as modern Iran. This visual style, as well as a sense of humour rooted in pop culture, break down what might have seemed like weighty subject matter.
The film begins with the adult Marji (voiced by Chiara Mastroianni in both the French-language version and the dubbed print I saw) reflecting on her 1970s childhood. This spunky sprite worships Bruce Lee, shoots the breeze with God and believes she is a prophet. Her parents (Catherine Deneuve and Sean Penn) and grandmother (Gena Rowlands) embrace the overthrow of the shah's regime, but Marji soon realises that Iran is not changing for the better.
Like John Boorman's Hope and Glory, which offered the definitive child's-eye view of life during wartime, Persepolis keeps faith with its heroine's trifling concerns. Even with the Iran-Iraq War escalating and missiles destroying the neighbourhood, Marji's prime concern is winning a game of "My uncle has been in prison longer than your father", or scoring a copy of the new Iron Maiden album.
The drawings capture Marji's bewilderment at her rapidly changing surroundings so precisely that it is hard to imagine a live-action version carrying the same resonance. When she visits her dissident uncle in a Gothic prison cell rendered in charcoal smudges, the soft, clear lines of her own body make it seem as if she's strayed into the wrong comic book - something more sinister, to which children of her age should not be exposed. Meanwhile, headscarves and veils transform Marji and her classmates into rows of Russian dolls, peeking timidly from behind each other's sloping shoulders. No wonder she causes a ruckus by challenging her teacher's lies: she is not merely fighting for the truth, she is also struggling to differentiate herself.
Persepolis is at heart a fairly conventional coming-of-age story about a young woman trying to work out where she belongs. As it gradually conforms more overtly to this template, following Marji into a young adulthood of thwarted rebellion and failed love affairs, the film's power diminishes slightly. It may even be that it's too brisk for its own good; at times the action moves at such a lick that it feels as if we're leafing through Satrapi's graphic novel at high speed, with scarcely a pause for emphasis or elucidation. Whenever it is announced that another friend or relative has died or been arrested, you struggle to remember if this is a character to whom you've already been introduced, and to adjust your reaction accordingly.
Yet it would be churlish to complain too strongly about a film that crams so much energy and incident into such a brief running time, without sacrificing the clarity of its broader political context. The only thing worth a proper grumble is some of the translation work. Francophone audiences will hear Marji's grandmother remark that Marji has grown tall enough to "grab God's balls", while the US version has her reach instead for "God's beard". Anyone who has rightly admired the film's lightness of touch in dealing with Iranian history, political violence, religious fundamentalism, martyrdom and betrayal both ideological and romantic will regard such prissiness as misplaced, or just a load of old beard.
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