I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #195 - Persepolis (2007, dir. Marjane Satrapi/Vincent Paronnaud)

Shortly after moving to Portland, Oregon in early 2008, I went to a theater downtown one Saturday night and saw the film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis. The theater was full and the audience was buzzing with anticipation. This was during the final year of George W. Bush’s second term and something about viewing this film that night felt like a collective act of defiance. A couple years later I was working as a para-educator for Portland Public Schools in a program that served at-risk youth. A teacher and I worked in a single classroom with a group of high school aged girls who all lived together in the same group home. When the teacher went on maternity leave for the last quarter of the school year, she gave me the opportunity to choose a book for the Language Arts portion of the curriculum. Persepolis seemed like an obvious choice to me at the time and I was excited to introduce the students to this challenging, rich, and enlightening story.

Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s 95-minute adaptation of Satrapi’s nearly 350-page novel represents the ideal form for a film based on an existing literary work. The film not only gets straight to the heart of Satrapi’s coming-of-age story set against the historical backdrop of the Iranian Revolution, but it also breathes, bristles, and blossoms with a life of its own that doesn’t exist in the pages of the original. The directors condense, focus, and present Satrapi’s direct, episodic comic-strip novel through a stark, mostly monochromatic style of animation that quickly pulls the audience into the narrative. Persepolis flows with warmth and humor as the audience watches Marjane grow up, live through a revolution, survive a war, and strike out on her own as a young woman going to school in Europe. As heavy as this may sound (and it does get very heavy), Satrapi touches on the seemingly universal themes of family identity, homesickness, personal integrity, and a grandmother’s love in a refreshing, life-affirming, and unvarnished way. In both the French and English versions, real life mother and daughter, Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni voice the characters of Marjane’s mother and Marjane, respectively. Deneuve and Mastroianni’s natural chemistry and biological connection lend these characters a knowing intimacy that enhances the emotional depth of Marjane’s story. As a book, Persepolis has a lot in common with Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, but as a film, I can’t think of anything else that accomplishes what Persepolis does in the same way.

Looking back on teaching Persepolis, I recall both the headaches and the rewards of the process. Before leaving for the term, the teacher I worked with expressed concerns about my choice and suggested I opt for a more mainstream and less demanding book. Then, the substitute teacher who came in for the remainder of the year feared that the students wouldn’t understand the context of the book and undermined my lessons with superfluous (and laughable) attempts to make Iranian geopolitics more relevant to the students. It didn’t help matters that the class hated the first half of the book, which focuses on Marjane’s childhood. During these frustrating moments, I thought back to when I first saw this movie and remembered that such a remarkable and vital work of art was well worth the difficulties. As soon as we got into the second half of the book when Marjane is a young woman, the students fell in love with Persepolis and suddenly Language Arts became a lot more enjoyable. By the time we watched Persepolis in class, these young women, who my colleagues didn’t think would understand the source material, felt a profound connection to Marjane Satrapi’s story that surprised even me.

-         John Parsell