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.
-
John Parsell
