Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud (2007)

Persepolis is autobiographical and intertwines the filmmaker’s personal experience with the political events that shaped that experience.  To that extent, it’s a remarkable example of animated film and will naturally be compared with Waltz with Bashir, released a year or so later.   Yet Persepolis doesn’t stand comparison with Ari Folman’s film:  Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud don’t use animation in anything like the innovative ways that Folman does.  The look of Persepolis, which is mainly in black and white, is very distinctive but the film’s originality derives from the fact of presenting weighty themes through animation – not from discovering new artistic and technical possibilities in the medium, as a means of exploring complex political and psychological issues.

Persepolis is based on two graphic novels by Satrapi and tells the story of her coming of age.  A great-granddaughter of a nineteenth-century Shah of Persia, she was born in 1969 and grew up in Tehran in a middle-class family strongly involved in left-wing political activity in Iran prior to the 1979 revolution.    The family’s delight at the fall of the Shah is soon overtaken by the loss of civil liberties under the repressive Islamic nationalist regime and the Iran-Iraq war of the early 1980s.  As a young teenager, Satrapi was sent by her parents to Vienna, where she completed her schooling before returning to Iran.  After university and a short-lived marriage in Tehran, she emigrated to France, where she’s lived ever since.

The graphic novels were written in French and the film intensifies the Frenchness – and seriously detracts from the ethnic distinctiveness of the source material.   Marji’s grandmother, whom she adores, is a dominant character – through the way that she’s drawn, the moral lessons she imparts to her granddaughter, and the voice of Danielle Darrieux.  The grandmother looks and sounds utterly French.   The voices of Marji and her mother – provided by Chiara Mastroianni and her mother Catherine Deneuve – don’t register anything like as strongly as Darrieux’s:  the Iranian identity of the pair derives only from the hijab costume.   (Mastroianni and Deneuve reprised the voices for a dubbed English version of the film, in which Gena Rowlands did the grandmother’s voice and Sean Penn the voice of Marji’s father, read in the French original by Simon Abkarian.)    And the film’s humour seems pretty much the same – and just as tedious – as the jokes in animated features like the gruesomely oh-so-French Les Triplettes de Belleville.

13 April 2009