Persepolis | Little White Lies

Perse­po­lis

24 Apr 2008 / Released: 25 Apr 2008

Monochrome illustration of 3 figures, one wearing a "Punk is not dead" t-shirt, against a cityscape background.
Monochrome illustration of 3 figures, one wearing a "Punk is not dead" t-shirt, against a cityscape background.
4

Anticipation.

Let’s see: a hand-drawn, 2D, black-and-white, French-language, Iranian animation… What’s not to love?

5

Enjoyment.

A humane, heartfelt film executed with sublime skill.

5

In Retrospect.

A stunning example of the art form. Who needs 3D?

Mar­jane Satrapi comes straight out of the under­ground and socks it to the big boys.

Ani­ma­tion is like the Wild West,” says Mar­jane Satrapi. Any­thing is pos­si­ble.” Real­ly? Ani­ma­tion may be the Wild West, but its sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty has been horse whipped and run out of town. The cor­po­rate cow­boys are in charge, and unless you’re a CGI pen­guin or wise­crack­ing don­key, you can expect to be on the receiv­ing end of some rough justice.

But for any­body who believes that 2D is dead, Mar­jane Satrapi just brought it back to life. Her debut film, Perse­po­lis, is a black-and-white, French lan­guage, hand-drawn ani­ma­tion set in post-rev­o­lu­tion­ary Iran. And it’s a pow­er­ful reminder that old-fash­ioned val­ues still count: that orig­i­nal­i­ty, cre­ativ­i­ty and risk-tak­ing can take ani­ma­tion beyond the ghet­to of fam­i­ly enter­tain­ment and make it matter.

Of course, 2D nev­er real­ly died, not while the likes of Syl­vain Chomet and Michel Ocelot kept its heart beat­ing. But in Amer­i­ca, tra­di­tion­al ani­ma­tion got the shit kicked out of it by Pixar, and the major stu­dios nev­er quite recov­ered. So what if The Iron Giant proved that there was life left in the hand drawn for­mat? There was a mag­i­cal new dimen­sion out there. CGI was the future, and every­thing else was history.

In 2004, Dis­ney closed its 2D ani­ma­tion stu­dio in Flori­da. And though, iron­i­cal­ly, John Lasseter’s appoint­ment as Chief Cre­ative Offi­cer might reverse the decline, even the pre­vi­ous­ly infal­li­ble Pixar have start­ed to suc­cumb to the law of dimin­ish­ing returns. What seemed like a brave new world has some­how stag­nat­ed. They promised that sto­ry would be king, but it’s for­mu­la and famil­iar­i­ty that rule.

Mar­jane Satrapi may not be able to halt the slide, but she does offer a glim­mer of hope. Work­ing in a Parisian stu­dio with a minis­cule bud­get and an under­ground ethos, she’s proved that there’s still a place at the table for the lit­tle guy. It’s her per­son­al­i­ty that gives Perse­po­lis it’s unique iden­ti­ty, and it’s that iden­ti­ty that makes the film an act of such glo­ri­ous defiance.

Based on Satrapi’s own graph­ic nov­els, Perse­po­lis begins as a child’s eye mem­o­ry of the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion. It’s 1979 and Mar­ji (voiced as a young­ster by Gabrielle Lopes, and as an adult by Chiara Mas­troian­ni) is a nine-year-old girl whose child­hood dreams of Bruce Lee and shav­ing her legs are replaced by the alto­geth­er more adult excite­ment of pol­i­tics. As their par­ents march into the bul­lets of the Shah’s army, kids chase the off­spring of sus­pect­ed secret police­men, or chant slo­gans that they only half understand.

Mar­ji is spell­bound by her Uncle Anouche, a comu­niss’ who has been released from jail to help plan the future of the coun­try. But what began as a people’s upris­ing morphs into an Islam­ic rev­o­lu­tion, and though Anouche clings to the belief that the peo­ple will choose free­dom, he is soon back in jail, the veil is intro­duced, and alco­hol and music are banned. In the midst of this upheaval, Mar­ji under­goes her own rad­i­cal changes. The excit­ed girl gives way to a rebel­lious teenag­er who is sent to Europe for her own safe­ty. And though she returns to Iran, it is only to set the scene for a final farewell.

In Per­sian his­to­ry, Perse­po­lis was the half-built cap­i­tal of the ancient empire. To Satrapi, it becomes a mon­u­ment to bet­ter times only half remem­bered, and per­haps only half true, but a pow­er­ful touch­stone nonethe­less. And that, indeed, is the heart of her film: it’s a poem of exile and dis­lo­ca­tion and the keen­ly felt love for home and family.

Marji’s par­ents are beau­ti­ful­ly drawn, and there’s a heart-wrench­ing scene when she leaves them at the air­port to begin her ill-fat­ed life in Vien­na. But the stand­out char­ac­ter is her grand­moth­er, voiced by Danielle Dar­rieux, who rep­re­sents anoth­er con­nec­tion to the old Iran, not just before the rev­o­lu­tion but before the Shah. While Mar­ji is a pas­sive hero­ine, tossed around by fate and cir­cum­stance, her grand­moth­er is the rock that she clings to.

Their scenes togeth­er are so affect­ing, so clear­ly expe­ri­enced, that it feels like you’re intrud­ing on a pri­vate mem­o­ry. Then in a flash, Satrapi will evoke a moment as when jas­mine flow­ers fall from her grandmother’s bra, and you can only mar­vel at its expres­sive beauty.

And yet this high­ly per­son­al sto­ry reach­es out beyond the per­son­al expe­ri­ence of its author. The Tehran that we see before the rev­o­lu­tion could be Lon­don or Paris or New York. Though the polit­i­cal atmos­phere was tox­ic, for most Ira­ni­ans life was, well, life. It meant par­ties and friends and fun. And even after the rev­o­lu­tion, when every aspect of our lives changed, and so did we,” the peo­ple of Iran found ways not just to sur­vive, but to car­ry on liv­ing. Par­ties moved under­ground and sex became more dis­crete, but life became a sto­ry of every­day rev­o­lu­tions, each one a vic­to­ry against the system.

For­get the film’s colour scheme: by show­ing us this unseen side of Iran, Satrapi has tak­en a black-and-white issue and invest­ed it with a new sense of sub­tle­ty. The Iran that we see every day – the axis of evil’, the ter­ror­ist state – is not the Iran of the Iran­ian people.

Our media would tell us that Ira­ni­ans are defined by hatred; what Perse­po­lis shows is the pal­pa­ble sense of dis­be­lief that enveloped the coun­try. They are angry just as we would be angry at the lies, the sex­u­al hypocrisy and the dehu­man­is­ing absur­di­ty of the new régime – one in which a win­dow clean­er can become a gov­ern­ment min­is­ter because he grows a beard and hates women.

But in show­ing that the peo­ple of Iran are no dif­fer­ent from us – were not in some way pre­dis­posed towards accept­ing a repres­sive régime – Satrapi sug­gests that it could hap­pen just as eas­i­ly to us. And before we laugh at the sug­ges­tion, it’s worth glanc­ing uneasi­ly over the Atlantic at a coun­try where a Cre­ation­ist can run for pres­i­dent; or clos­er to home where a lib­er­al politi­cian can’t admit to being an athe­ist with­out a tor­tured apology.

There is, in that sense, a veiled crit­i­cism of the West, although far more damn­ing is what hap­pens to the coun­try after it is invad­ed by Iraq. Here, Perse­po­lis assumes an apoc­a­lyp­tic tone, tak­ing its visu­al cues from wartime pro­pa­gan­da posters and its pac­ing from the per­cus­sive beat of sui­cide bomb­ings. The war, financed and encour­aged by the West, changed every­thing in Iran.

Only one rule will pre­vail,” announces a wild-eyed mul­lah, that of blood!” As young men are offered a plas­tic key to heav­en where they’re promised an end­less sup­ply of vir­gins, the ugly cult of mar­tyr­dom takes hold, dec­i­mat­ing the coun­try. These are the film’s angri­est scenes, and though the pri­ma­ry tar­get remains the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment, they’re hard to watch with­out a sense of guilty com­plic­i­ty. Per­haps that accounts for the ambiva­lent shot of a Vogue cov­er, which hints sug­ges­tive­ly that the dan­gers of West­ern impe­ri­al­ism might be real.

If all this sounds like a veiled his­to­ry les­son, don’t wor­ry. Though it occa­sion­al­ly laps­es into expo­si­tion – as when Uncle Anouche recounts the sto­ry of his exile – these are often the film’s most visu­al­ly arrest­ing moments. They’re deli­cious­ly exot­ic; like read­ing from some ancient Ara­bic text dec­o­rat­ed with obscure artis­tic motifs. Some clever dis­solves, wipes and play­ful fades give Perse­po­lis a kind of non-lin­ear qual­i­ty, as if the scenes in front of you aren’t being scanned con­sec­u­tive­ly, but have rather been dragged up from some place deep inside like a recov­ered memory.

And besides, for all the film’s polit­i­cal sym­pa­thies, it grad­u­al­ly reveals itself to be less a lament for some bygone age as a cel­e­bra­tion of the here and now. Despite the exile, the hijab and the near fatal mis­takes, above every­thing Mar­ji rep­re­sents the defi­ant pos­si­bil­i­ties of youth. That’s some­thing no régime can deny, even when they remove its sym­bols and trap­pings. It’s that youth­ful spir­it that keeps her alive (as cap­tured in arguably the great­est movie mon­tage of all time, bril­liant­ly scored to Eye of the Tiger’) and, more­over, keeps her coun­try alive too, what­ev­er the price.

Though it’s always tempt­ing to give cred­it to an indi­vid­ual author, in truth, Perse­po­lis is tes­ta­ment to the incred­i­ble work of the entire team assem­bled by Satrapi and her co-direc­tor Vin­cent Paron­naud. Paron­naud him­self appears in a small cameo – a reflec­tion of his humil­i­ty rather than the role he played in the film’s production.

Like­wise, every sin­gle artist who spent hours hand-draw­ing over 600 char­ac­ters, and those who traced every last frame in black ink, and the back­ground design­ers and the colourists and all the rest deserve every word of praise that comes their way. Because these are the peo­ple prov­ing that it’s not just the brave new world that counts, it’s the artistry and won­der of the old one too.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.