Persepolis

From A.O. Scott’s review:

“Perse­po­lis” is a simple story told by simple means. Like Mar­jane Satrapi’s book, on which it is based, the film, directed by Ms. Satrapi and Vin­cent Paron­naud, con­sists essen­tially of a series of mono­chrome draw­ings, their bold black lines washed with nuances of gray. The pic­tures are arranged into the chron­i­cle of a young girl’s coming of age in dif­fi­cult times, a tale that unfolds with such grace, intel­li­gence and charm that you almost take the won­drous aspects of its exe­cu­tion for granted.

I loved Perse­po­lis… the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion was a curi­ous thing to study, in col­lege. Through­out the middle part of the last cen­tury, with the Cold War raging, the expec­ta­tion for “Rev­o­lu­tion” was nearly always a marx­ist con­cern. Even little Marjane’s rel­a­tives in Perse­po­lis expected the Pro­le­tariat to pre­vail. What was new and unique in Iran was the rise of a reac­tionary, reli­gious author­ity – that no one in the West, (and also the lib­eral elite in Iran), saw coming…

But as inter­est­ing as the pol­i­tics in the film are, this is still pri­mar­ily the story of a young girl, and her per­sonal jour­ney. I loved Ms. Satrapi’s depic­tion of her anar­chist friends in Vienna, (where she attended French board­ing school). These Euro­peans embraced her in part because of her expe­ri­ence with rev­o­lu­tion and war, but they had no clue about the per­sonal cost of this expe­ri­ence. Teenaged Mar­jane strug­gles with her iden­tity, while they laugh behind her back. And in the end, we’re not quite sure that she comes out on top.

Perse­po­lis is a jour­ney worth taking, and the ani­ma­tion really is wonderful.

HD Trailer »