PERSEPOLIS: Personal / Political

March is Women's History Month, so let's continue last year's tradition of highlighting a weekly movie by female filmmakers. With the recent global resurgence of toxic masculinity and fascist norms, it's all the more important to seek gender parity in the director's chair. For the director is as much an embodiment of the soul of a movie as any one person can be, and the souls of men are clearly not good enough.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Directors: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud
Writers: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud
Cast: Chiara Mastroianni, Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Simon Abkarian, Gabrielle Lopes Benites
Runtime: 96 mins.
2007

Years ago I read Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel upon which this was based. It accomplished the monumental task of making me, a privileged white American, care about the politics and people of Iran. An exercise in empathy foremost, history secondarily, Persepolis is a coming of age story that digs deeply into the personal life of its author--and as we know, the personal is political.

I didn't get around to the film at the time because I assumed it would be a competent retread of the book. After all, graphic novels and animation are two mediums with a great deal of overlap: two dimensional frames meant to give the illusion of movement that are more reliant on images than words. How wonderful to discover, then, that Satrapi's foray into directing improves upon its original in every aspect, engaging with what is specifically cinematic about the material rather than letting it stagnate in the act of translation.

The story remains mostly unchanged. We see Marji progress through her idealistic youth, troubled adolescence, and frustrating love life. Each of these life stages is inextricably tied to Iran's progress through dictatorship, revolt, regression, and war. Marjane seeks to honor the memory of her fallen family members, whose fates are tied to the various regime changes. Marjane's identity will always be tied to her roots, which is both a rich premise and a resonant lesson that her character must learn over the course of the film.


The most prominent alteration from the novel is the addition of a slim framing narrative that doubles as the only part of the movie in color. An adult Marjane (Chiara Mastroianni) passes time in an airport experiencing the constant microaggressions that a Middle Eastern woman in the West is regrettably used to. As she sits and smokes she begins to lose herself in memories, at which point we get the first indicator that Persepolis is doing incredible medium-pushing work. A little cel-shaded girl sprints eagerly past Marjane, and with her the frame transforms to black and white. We are in the past, and little Marji's family is meeting someone in a Tehran airport.

This is our introduction to the gorgeous black and white animation of Persepolis. The frames are often dominated by a foggy blackness, with gradients of white popping out in characters and scenery. Unlike most animation, Persepolis doesn't feel the need to fill out the mise-en-scéne, which makes what does get included all the more essential. The minimalism creates an abstract painterly quality that is far more compelling than the glut of rote animation, particularly 3D animation, that is content to strive for banal verisimilitude.

This style lends itself to some incredible edits. We've all seen sweep edits if we've seen a Star Wars movie, but Persepolis ties its imaginative edits directly to the narrative. I'm thinking particularly of what may be the film's best sequence, a graphic portrayal of an uprising against the Shah. Silhouettes of a protesting mob march across the frame, filling it until it is entirely black. Several such transitions pull us hypnotically through the action. We've seen angry mobs before, but never so artfully; when violence erupts, the brutality lands in the pit of your stomach.

The film knows how to keep its audience invested, and even its detours through drier subject matters are presented in inventive ways that are directly tied to character. When the film sees fit to drop some exposition about British imperialism and interference in Iran's politics, it doesn't portray a hamfisted conversation or flashback. Rather, it stages a sort of puppet show, with simple figurines of world leaders sharing a simple, and kind of goofy, dialogue. The unsubtle formal playfulness of this history lesson pops because it is exactly the level of complexity that young Marji would have been able to digest at the time. Everything in Persepolis is rooted in character.

In a way, that leads to my only complaint about the film. For a stretch in the middle, Marjane leaves Iran to pursue her studies in Vienna. As she drifts around from temporary home to temporary home, from friend group to friend group, her status as an outsider becomes unsustainable. She feels displaced and ultimately becomes a drifter lacking a sense of purpose. Although this section of the film serves an important narrative purpose, her time spent away from Iran is less engaging. The film's previous personal/political balance is upset, as we spend far more time learning about Marjane's individual woes. It doesn't help that so much of this period of her life is tangential. The characters we meet and the places she lives don't much matter in the long run, which is kind of the point, but we lose the immediacy and immersion that the film had done so well.

I would be sympathetic to the argument that that's part of the point--as Marjane grows numb to her life, so do we. At any rate, it's hard to fault someone's biography for not being constantly propulsive. Persepolis never loses our attention, and I am even grateful for its slower moments. They allow us to spend more time in Marjane's gorgeous, funny, mesmerizing, devastating world. This film is a masterclass of marrying form to content. Like any truly excellent story, Persepolis fully and fearlessly injects us into the experience of another person.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS