Persepolis
French. Animated. Excellent.
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis retells her coming-of-age as a young woman during the Iranian Revolution. The film is based on Satrapi’s similarly named graphic novel, and the adaptation stays notably true to the original medium. I was struck by two facts at the outset: the movie is in French, and the movie is animated. For the first few minutes, these factors seemed barriers between me and the film, but quickly fell away — in fact, they yielded a more universal storytelling.
Satrapi is an Iranian-born French director, and so I doubt that she chose to make a movie in French any more than an American director chooses to make a movie in English. That said, Sony Pictures Classics could have easily dubbed the film to reach a larger audience. I’m glad they didn’t. I don’t speak a word of French, but one needn’t be a francophone to feel the dialogue. The voice actors were excellent, almost musicians. At times, I stopped reading the subtitles altogether — they felt extraneous. Do you read sheet music while listening to jazz?
The most notable dialogue came from young Marjane, her mother, and her grandmother who are voiced by Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, and Danielle Darrieux respectively. Even before the Shah is ousted, Marjane’s mother regularly pushed her child to be an unapologetic woman. I heard it in her voice as a mom tried to infuse her daughter with pride and self-command. Marjane and her mother interacted with a sonic relation that transcended language and even the film. After the movie I looked up the three actresses . Catherine Deneuve is Chiara Mastroianni’s mother.
Again, Persepolis is animated. Of course, this is in keeping with Satrapi’s original graphic novel. But beyond the continuity, the animation has three effects which — together — carry the film.
The first is purely aesthetic, Satrapi often lingers on a shot so that it becomes a standalone piece of art. In one of these scenes, Marjane has traveled to Vienna for a study abroad program and has cut herself off from her friends after they make crude remarks about Iranians. In the shot, Marjane smokes a cigarette and remains perfectly still; the only movement is the smoke as it curls out a window. This shimmer of motion emphasizes the emptiness and stillness of the room while creating a sense of profound loneliness and paralysis
The second effect concerns storytelling. Especially in the beginning of the narrative, Marjane struggles to understand an age-old question: If God is all-powerful and always good, why is there evil in the world? She takes the question to Him directly. The film is regularly punctuated with their conversations, or rather her dreams of their conversations. And so, the viewer sees God as young Marjane sees Him; animation grants the filmmaker more license in accessing the character’s internal-self.
The third and final effect is that of message. Not only is the film animated, but the scenes are drawn in black and white and greys. Skin tones are universal — Westerners and Middle-Easterners can only be differentiated by context. For me, an American viewer, this is not the story of foreigners in a foreign country, but of people in a country. In Iran, Marjane is often reprimanded by women in veils for wearing her headscarf incorrectly. After travelling to Austria, Marjane is once again scolded for being “unladylike” by women in veils — Catholic nuns.
Ultimately, Satrapi’s political message is two-fold: Iranians are not so different from Westerners; the West might be less immune to Iran’s fate than we like to think.