Persepolis Perceived

I saw Persepolis the other night, and thought it was brilliant.

Persepolis is the story of Marjane Satrapi, a bright, imaginative girl growing up in post revolutionary Iran where brightness and imagination and girlhood are severely suppressed.  Her kind parents and her tough, wise grandmother suffer under the stupid petty thuggery of the regime, while one uncle, a communist, is executed.  Afraid that Marjane’s rash behaviour will get her into trouble, her family send her to Vienna, where she takes up with a crowd of cool spoiled cynical Westerners.  She finds the culture hard to adjust to.  There's a particularly comic caricacture of a shouty lead singer in a punk band.  The Westerners are indifferent to politics, which are literal life and death to her family in Iran.   She returns home but living there is difficult.  She is studying art, and the authorities have rubbed out Venus in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and the life class model is draped in a burkha.  So she leaves Iran again for France and exile.

I don’t read graphic novels and I haven’t seen many animated films either, so what I got out of it might be old hat and obvious to those used to those genres.  To me it was a revelation the way that the form works by forcing your attention, uncluttered by the distractions that human actors offer.  When you watch an actor performing a part you see the well-known face and the mannerisms.  With illustrations you concentrate on the emotions conveyed by the drawing.  You are focused, you are directed, as when following the narrator’s voice in a novel. 

That narrator’s voice and point of view is what you normally lose when putting a novel on screen.  Look, says the novel’s narrator, at Hetty’s eyelashes and Adam’s response to them, and the actors do their best with it.  But with animation you can do it in stylised short-hand – Hetty’s eyelashes, longer than they could ever be even with prosthetics, and Adam’s response, cruder than a competent actor’s could be but clearer and sharper. 

The objects like the swans Marjane’s uncle carved from bread in prison and the jasmine that falls from her grandmother’s bra have a magic power. The white swans sail on her bed and the white jasmine flowers fall and they, white on the black background, seem to glow with meaning.  This is how the world appears through Marjane’s eyes, for instance when her boyfriend arrives like an angel bathed in light then turns into a goofy idiot.

The characters are arranged to form designs e.g. curves (the women Revolutionary Guard) framing with menace a cylinder (little Marjane).  When Marjane moves house over and over again in Vienna she gaily jumps from one roof top to another. There is charm, comedy, anger and grief within this film, which filled me with fresh delight.