Heavy metal on Gandhi Street
In Marjane Satrapi’s film adaptation of Persepolis, teen Marjane prowls Tehran’s Gandhi Street, snaking between matchstick men advertising sotto voce their illicit goods: Iron Maiden, ‘Jichael Mackson’ and lipstick. The movie is wonderful and engaging and more real than most films, dealing with war and cultural dislocation in a smarter, funnier, less whiny fashion than most second-gen artistic output.
But the movie inadvertently deracinates Iranians, making an alien culture palatable to Western film audiences, by rendering them literally in white and doing the dialogue in French. The net effect is something pen-and-ink and arty, like a certain genre of Japanese anime, but you get very little Iranian flavor. Headscarves are drawn in the same heavy black as hair, and the rare run of Arabic script is jarring in context.
Made from a female perspective, the film dishearteningly has little to say about its central war. The casualties of the Iran-Iraq conflict are merely corpses sliding into mass graves at a distance. The moment seems also to obliquely refer to American soldiers in Iraq. Marjane is as banal about love as many teens, and save for one very funny sequence about falling out of love, the intemperate girl’s grand revelations of men-as-cheaters and men-as-potential-homosexuals seem like self-inflicted wounds.
The movie ends with Marjane’s entrée into Paris, satrap of little but her own path. I’d have liked to see older Marjane’s tale. The rest will stay with you a long time: the sense of an old, relatively liberal culture sliding into a cesspool of petty nanny-state Islamism. Apart from the animation circuit (it has hints of Sita), Persepolis is like little else out.
Bowing to pressure from Iran, Thailand has withdrawn the award-winning animated movie Persepolis… from the Bangkok International Film Festival… Persepolis not only criticises strongly the Ayatollahs’ regime, but also lashes out at the Western countries for having backed a tyrant such the Shah by supplying his government with weapons… [Link]
M.G. Roads aren’t limited to India, New Jersey and Tehran; you’ll also find them in Ankara and Ulaanbataar, just as you find JFK Streets in the strangest places.
on Monday, January 14th, 2008, 5:15 pm in Film, History, Issues, Politics › 
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I agree about the pen/ink/arty business, but if the film (and its literary predecessor) was written/drawn by an Irani about her life in Iran, is it not by definition Iranian? Or, at least, her interpretation of Iran?
The artistic style seems to say more about the author and her method of remembering than about an attempt to recreate a location photorealistically.
I’m saying it’s so abstracted, visually it could be set anywhere. Whereas others get culturally specific to become universal.
I recently finished reading an English translation of Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” which was originally written in French (not Persian). - at th The visualization is simplistic, but effective particularly in the scenes of young Marjane in Iran and her slow, coming of age before being sent to live abroad: at that point, her world is only Iran, a black and white she slowly learns to question.
In response to Blue: I wouldn’t say her view is necessarily “Iranian” because Satrapi comes from a background that is not only upper middle-class, but also liberal and far more secular than what many outside Iran perceive its society to be even before the fall of the Shah, let alone within it. For example, Satrapi’s grandmother had been married twice, with her first marriage and subsequent divorce taking place in the 1940s - I doubt that was common at the time. I definitely think Satrapi’s novel depicts very well the difficulty and absurdity of living in an Iran that cannot withstand the presence of a young woman running in the streets (it makes her hips and posterior jiggle a bit too suggestively for the cultural police, to whom Sarjane responds, “Well, stop looking at my ass!”).
But even as it tries to position itself as a modern, very relevant fable, it loses its potency as it expounds on the “glories” of a western life. Seeing her trials and tribulations in Paris would have been interesting, but she’s still in the midst of that stage and possible needs more distance to write about it.
Ugh. UGH.
This film is about Satrapi. Based on the book she wrote. In French. About herself. Which was created in pen and ink.
And what’s with this female-perspective bullshit, Vij Uncle? It’s done from Satrapi’s perspective.
Quit trying to turn it into something it’s not trying to be.
It is a wonderful film. Like Tamasha says, it’s about Satrapi. Who you will fall in love with if you read the books or see the movie.
Which is a cop-out. The criticisms apply equally to the graphic novel. C’mon, you’ve got a bully pulpit to the Western world and all you’re going to say about the central conflict of your time is that war is bad?
Clearly ‘punk is not ded’ =:) It’s a domestic perspective, the war is at a remove. Much like, say, Liesle’s perspective on Rolfe and the war in The Sound of Music.
She didn’t set out to make grand proclamations about war. Nor did she need to. Like others have said, it is a story about Satrapi, or more specifically, how islamic revolution turned her life upside down.
Without the war, her memoir is banal. It’s the war and the politics, the execution of her uncle, that give it resonance. But she has nothing to say about it in Persepolis. I bet if you sat down with her, she’d be flush with political opinion, so why excise it? It hollows out the core.
It’s the honesty and heart that give it resonance. It’s about one human’s experience, which includes war. I appreciate its depiction of the subtler effects of war and social upheaval on the daily life of even a privileged family. There are plenty of overtly political films and war films; Persepolis is something else.That Marjane’s greatest challenge is not war but love isn’t banal, it’s honest and humble and touching.
But if you look at the boyfriends, they’re a succession of flat cutouts. The movie has little new to say about love, whereas her depiction of the effects of war has depth. That’s why it’s frustrating that so little is said about it. It’s the elephant in the room, and she skirts it gingerly.
Nina’s got it Manish: That Marjane’s greatest challenge is not war but love isn’t banal, it’s honest and humble and touching.
The impression I’m getting is that it’s not OK, it’s not enough, if a person from a hot-spot region doesn’t always address these political issues in his or her work.
Hmm. Maybe it’s a chick flick? Being animated, that would make it a chick trick-flick. Maybe Manish just doesn’t understand.
They’re a list of boyfriends summarized into types, which is, unfortunately, how us ladies tell the stories of our previous relationships. ^__^
(I’d daresay men do the same. *__^)
I’ll admit its take on dating is about as well done as a LiveJournal ;)
I don’t think western audiences necessarily need another movie about wars. An honest, humble and touching (to use Nina’s words) portrayal of eastern people is probably holds more depth for western audiences, and is definitely more needed. If that shared humanity has to be conveyed by drawings, so be it, it wouldn’t be the first time a confusing or contradictory (to commonly held beliefs) message has been boiled down to simpler visualizations for the real point to be able to come accross correctly.
What I liked about Persepolis (the graphic novel especially) was the perspective the story was told. Satrapi used the view of a child to show how war affected her life and self concept. For me thats why things were simplified. The movie provided more historic backing at the beginning but by doing the whole story as a flashback, everything seems so simple and there is a lack of reflection from an adult perspective. I felt like it was very much about her and her experience the entire time. I appreciated her sharing her experience navigating her identity in France and Iran and how she felt like she never really fit in anywhere but did at the same time.
Also I found there to be many positive as well as bland male characters in the book, (and i hardly think she feels like most men are evil or gay). In fact her two heroes are her grandmother and her uncle who she profoundly respects and admires.
The animation style I agree is kinda problematic and ick ick. But even with legitimate concerns, it is the story of growing up, maturing , and experiencing oneself. I appreciate her voice.