One of a Kind
A cult graphic novel, one of the very best, provides the source for Persepolis, which, we predict, will win the best animated-film Oscar on Feb. 24. It’s a ’serious’ coming-of-age comedy (with a female central character) overseen by the novel’s originator, Marjane Satrapi (and co-written/co-directed by Vincent Paronnaud).
Its heroine–Marjane–is an Iranian girl growing up in Tehran of the ’70s and ’80s, centering, at first, on the Islamic Revolution. This is a tough subject, which the animators treat with inventive humor and genuine emotion, creating a character comedy.
We first focus on Marjane at age eight or nine, when she first hears of dissent against the Iranian Shah, who, at the time, was largely a U.S. puppet firmly in our pocket. Her loving family, among whose voices are Catherine Deneuve and Danielle Darrieux, has provided stability and support, but times are increasingly difficult so Marjane is sent first to Vienna and then to Paris for safe schooling. In these years she is aswirl in worlds of near-empty pop culture, teen angst and troubling romance(s).
Now Marjane is confronted with rich-kid Viennese punkers, drugs, fashionable nihilism, black-market American music (Black Maiden, anyone?) and genuine alienation. The drawing-style here is stylized and simplistic, almost a child’s view of reality.
Funny and incisive, this unprecedented film is doing good business world-wide–mostly from terrific word-of-mouth. It’s universal in its coming-of-age theme–and is surprisingly entertaining most of the way through. The film is a tough sell because its synopsis doesn’t sound particularly promising–a graphic novel movie about an Iranian girl growing up in three cultures. Among other accomplishments, the film serves to dissolve our perhaps dated notions about those cultures–and that’s all to the good.
Of course, in the last ten years Iran has given some of the best films in the world, most live-action, some based on Iranian legends, some political allegory; but Persepolis breaks the mold: it’s about a female, it’s done by a woman, and, because it looks like a ‘cartoon,’ it escaped the wrath of Iranian critics Ö mostly. If it wins an Oscar, it will receive even more world attention as the first of its kind, in a world in which cultural repression is re-rearing its head, (The Asian furor over the sex scenes in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution has resulted in the cancellation of several projects by governments.)
Peresepolis is a cunning, funny take on the changing world–and does more to show the potential of graphic novel movies than almost any other such project. It’s playing here during Oscar week–and is a real treat for discerning audiences, You know who you are.
