It’s Day’s night, and no one is going to spoil her story
A Sentimental Journey
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This is a shocking, replenishing film, not to be missed
Green Zone
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It is great that Bruno Loubet is back — and at prices that are eminently fair
Bistro Bruno Loubet
The action and direction are superb and the acting good, but the plot is so pathetic it defies belief
Wonderful - beautifully acted and gloriously funny, particularly Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw
Probably the most important photography exhibition london has ever seen
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud.
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Simon Abkarian, Chiara Mastroianni
Description: Marjane grows up in '70s Iran, which seems determined to crush her spirit. Her parents and feisty grandmother applaud her independence. However, they realise that Marjane's lust for life will eventually lead her into trouble with the Ayatollah Khomeini regime. So they send her away to Austria where the carefree western ways of her new friends fail to impress Marjane and she yearns for her homeland. Returning many years later into her family's welcoming arms, Marjane discovers that the Tehran of her childhood is very different to the capital city of the '90s.
Country: FR. 2007. 96mins
Trapped: Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical film follows her heroine out of Iran to Vienna
Ever the rebel: Marjane aged nine, already fighting back against Islamic conformity
Films about growing up made by adults who don’t remember the process too well are legion — that’s why the American movie Juno, which recalls the trials and tribulations with fecund accuracy, has done so well.
However, you wouldn’t expect a black-and-white, hand-drawn animation, made by an Iranian woman, to trump Juno’s aces. But it does.
This extraordinary movie was drawn from a series of popular graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, its director, who was aided in its making by Vincent Paronnaud, a French comic-book artist.
Admittedly, Persepolis has added interest in that Marjane, its main character, first seen as a little girl of nine and clearly based upon Satrapi herself, lives through the fall of the Shah, the Iran-Iraq war, which killed millions, and the coming of fundamentalism before removing herself first to Vienna and then to Paris.
But it is not so much a political film — even if it dares more in that direction than you might expect — as a wonderfully accurate-seeming portrait of growing up within the tide of history, and of someone who is never quite defeated by the dead hand of circumstance that threatens to stunt her life.
Marjane is precocious and outspoken enough to be a worry to her parents, if not to her grandmother, who constantly abjures her to go her own way regardless. Her idols are Bruce Lee, Abba, the Bee Gees and Iron Maiden. She wears the latest sneakers she can find in Tehran, and a T-shirt that has “Punk Is Not Ded” written on the back.
At first she sings that the Shah was chosen by God but is quickly disabused by her Communist uncle, who is shot for his Left-wing aspirations after the Shah’s fall. Instead of the hoped-for democracy, the Iran-Iraq war (during which both sides were armed by the West, and Saddam by the British) makes life tough in the capital. So Marjane is packed off to Vienna at the age of 14 where she endures endless teenage traumas before a broken love affair sends her into the streets. Nothing is made easier by the fact that she is Iranian and equated with the extremism she fled her country to escape.
In the end, she decides to return home where she has to put on the veil, avoid the moral police for wearing make-up, enter an art school where girls are taught separately and the models they attempt to paint are fully clothed, and then marry after being caught holding hands in the street with a boy.
All the time, she is too independently minded to knuckle under completely, shouting at the police about the treatment of women, and talking back to the art school Guardians of the Revolution who impose ludicrous constraints in the name of religion. In all this grandma supports her, knowing that Marjane may be a rebel but is deeply Iranian and as close to her family as it is possible to be.
This is not by any means the whole of the story which is written with wit, irony and a real sense of the travails of youth. And the animation, deliberately two-dimensional, is far easier to contemplate than you might think given the latest computer-animated spectaculars. It is more than sufficient and adds a surprising amount of character and light and shade to the proceedings.
This is not so much a film for kids as a film about a kid — and it is one of the best you could possibly wish for.
Above all, it suggests that Iran is a nation, full of young people, that is intrinsically totally divorced from fundamentalism and may one day prove it. There are thousands upon thousands of Marjanes. Otherwise there would never have been a huge candle-lit procession and vigil of sympathy in the aftermath of 9/11.
Persepolis is being shown in two versions, according to the preference of the cinemas where it is programmed. One is in English, the other in the original French with English subtitles. The casts differ slightly but Chiara Mastroianni is Marjane as a teenager and adult in both, and Catherine Deneuve is her mother. In the English version, Sean Penn is her father and Gena Rowlands her grandmother, substituting for Simon Abkarian and Danielle Darrieux in the French. In either language, it’s excellent work from all concerned.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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