Persepolis

The animation in Persepolis (2007) is basically black and white, two-dimensional and high contrast—few shades of gray. Even so, the stylized figures are well rendered, and as we watch the main character Marjane Satrapi grow from early childhood to adulthood, she seems as real and fully realized as any character played by a live actor.

The film is autobiographical, based on the graphic novel of the film's co-writer and director Marjane Satrapi. We follow her from the last days of the Shah in 1977 to the late 1980s. The film is told retrospectively, from the viewpoint of Marjanne sitting in an airport lobby in the late 1990s, contemplating what appears to be her decision not to return to Tehran.

As much as this is a film about the life of Marjane, Persepolis is also about the changing political and cultural climate of Iran after the Shah's death and the advent of an Islamic republic. Marjane's family goes from a state of wealth and affluence, where people can complain with some freedom about their dislike of the Shah, to a state of repression and persecution, where freedom of expression is basically impossible, where women must wear the veil, where dissenters are carted off and imprisoned or worse. In short, Persepolis is about living in a repressive, totalitarian regime. Its ancestors include 1984, Darkness at Noon, Cancer Ward, and other works about individuals repressed by an authoritarian government.

Marjane is an outspoken and intelligent young woman who shows her nonconformist personality in early childhood. When her parents begin to fear this personality will get her in trouble, they send her to private school in Vienna. At first she is happy there, but eventually, after bad landlords and errant love affairs, things go wrong. Marjane spends months living on the streets before she calls her parents and asks to return home. In Vienna she is free to be herself, but she struggles with her Iranian identity, sometimes pretending to be French, sometimes repressing her Iranian origins because she fears the reactions of people around her. But when she returns to Tehran she finds that she is not at home there anymore either , is not free to speak her mind, in one way or other is under constant government scrutiny, and she becomes depressed.

The film is full of satirical jabs at the Islamic republic. In an art history class, Marjane listens to a lecture about Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus." The professor uses an image of the painting to illustrate his lecture—all vestiges of nudity in the painting have been blotted out. In a painting class devoted to the human form, the female model is clothed in heavy black clothing—there is nothing to paint. Marjane is the film's symbol of individualism, of free expression. She blazes brightly, and as a result the republic threatens to obliterate her. When we first see her in the film, she is a tired, worn older woman, clearly showing the strain of the life she has lived. The film does not offer a happy outcome.

Persepolis was made in France, and the dialogue is in French. The film drags a bit after Marjane's return to Tehran from Vienna, but all in all it is a compelling and distressing document.