"Persepolis"

Marjane Satrapi's personality—skeptical, sardonic, rebellious, but also loving and cautiously hopeful—is the force that makes her autobiographical graphic novels about her girlhood in Iran and coming of age in Europe so winning. Persepolis, the mostly-black-and-white animated film that adapts four of these works, and was written and co-directed by Satrapi with Vincent Paronnaud, has that going for it too, of course. It also has an evocative and lively score by Olivier Bernet and stellar voice work by Catherine Deneuve, her own daughter (with Marcello Mastroianni) Chiarra Mastroianni, Danielle Darrieux, and Simon Abkarian. As is fitting, Mastroianni voices Satrapi while Deneuve voices Satrapi's mother.

Persepolis and its succesors were written in French, and this film, even the Iranian segments, is in French (Sony Pictures Classics, which is one of the film's producers, is prepping an English language version in which Sean Penn and Gena Rowlands are reportedly featured). As one of the great things about the world of an animated film is that it's a totally created one, there's not even a hint of the disconnect that would have been unavoidable in a live-action picture. The story of how Satrapi and her family were wrenched out of their often fraught but largely comfortable existence by the Islamic Revolution, how her relatives and fellow citizens suffered, and how she became a displaced person (the movie is bracketed and interspersed with color sequences of the adult Satrapi wandering around Orly after a quixotic attempt to get on a plane back to Tehran) brims with incident and pertinence. As awful as the things that happen in the story are, the viewer is happy to be in its world anyway, because Satrapi is such a companionable guide through it.

Satrapi's graphic style is simple—some of the early sequences look like Peanuts with headscarves—but it has legs, more than enough to sustain a 96-minute feature. Production designer Marisa Musy varies things a little with stippled landscapes and shades-of-gray effects that recall the work of Lotte Reiniger. I've been enjoying Satrapi's work for a while and was very much looking forward to this film, which may be why I can't do much more at the moment than purr with pleasure recalling it.

Comments

[London Calling]

Mmmm, purring with pleasure, eh? Sounds fantastic!