PERSEPOLIS

Distributed by: Sony Pictures Classics

Film will be released in the U.K. on April 24th 2008

Review by Oliver Pfeiffer

It’s a rare cinematic achievement when an animated feature can touch base on so many emotional not to mention cultural and socio-political levels. But writer-directors Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s bold, vividly harrowing, warmly witty and sometimes rudely funny and sophisticated gem of a movie manages to cross all boundaries to reach this high level of acclaim.

Persepolis embraces the journey of a bright young impressionable Iranian girl named Marji (voiced by Gabrielle Lopes and later Chiara Mastroianni), who is brought up in the midst of the controversial 1979 Islamic Revolution. We meet her idealistic mother (Catherine Deneuve) and father (Simon Abkarian), her feisty but warm natured grandmother (Danielle Darrieux), and political activist uncle who all try and educate and nurture her during these troubling times. Growing up to be an outspoken, fearless young girl Marji decides she has little respect for the religious rules and restrictions put about by the new tyrannical society that has now evolved, and discovers the new ‘anti-social’ westernised cultural delights of punk, Michael Jackson and Iron Maiden. Her parents begin to fear that her bold and rebellious nature will get Marji into trouble, therefore they whisk her away to boarding school in Vienna, where she has to face alone the sometimes tormenting ordeals of becoming a teenager in a sometime prejudice and oppressive environment.

Boldly utilising simple but riveting 2D monochromic black and white animation (that owes a considerable debt to the geometrical delights of silent era German expressionism), to communicate its harrowing and at times violent story, Persepolis starts out as indeed a bit of a political history lesson but loosens up into a potent and shatteringly precedent true to life story. If you find the, at times hard hitting political jargon, a little tough to digest there’s still much to relish in Marji’s moving and often funny perception of westernised decadence. Her hilarious take on the horrific extremes of teenage metamorphosis, (in a hilarious and dreamy eye-opening sequence that sees her body grow disproportionately) is wonderfully realised. As is the smaller details such as the visual hilarity of sprouting armpit hair on a German girl and the sudden grotesqueness of a newly discovered cheating boyfriend, who now takes the form of a spotty, nose picking prick rather than the handsome, considerate figure he was originally conceived to be. There’s also an hilarious send up of a newly discovered homosexual and the pitfalls of suffocating marital domestic life, which are quickly snubbed by Marji’s beloved grandmother: “don’t worry the first marriage is just practise for the next one”. The wonderful rule-breaking grandmother also voices one of the other remember-able lines in the movie, where a nine-year-old Marji questions why the old lady has such firm breasts, she replies “the result of dipping them in ice cold water for ten minutes each day”.

But aside from the comical moments in Persepolis there’s also a serious underpinning universal message about triumphing against the odds and staying true to yourself no matter what the consequences are. This is even more poignant when you realise that the story is true-to-life - the result of a painstaking translation and condensing of four volumes of director Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical novels.

This is a bold, intelligent and brilliantly rendered cinematic animated feature that rarely falters in getting across its intricate message (a crowd-pleasing life-changing sequence to the theme of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ is the only noticeable miscalculation). Though there may be more than ample material here to digest upon first viewing, Persepolis is one of those films that will happily lurk long in the memory for both its unflinching optimism in the face of tyranny and for its unparalleled distinctive visual intensity.

The OWF Team