Sherry Chandler

Persepolis

I have been wanting to see Persepolis since I saw a preview at Lexington’s Kentucky Theater earlier this year. Having finally got it through Netflix, however, I left it sitting on the table for several days, because I thought watching it would take concentration and mental energy. And I was right.

I am not a great appreciator of the graphic novel. I haven’t even read Maus, though it sits on our shelves and I appreciate Spiegelman’s New Yorker covers. I tend to think of graphic novels as sort of a guy thing, though I also know that that is rapidly becoming a dated attitude.

I was very taken by the graphic look and feel of Persepolis, however. The minimalist style, a look that might be characterized as the dark side of South Park (though, okay, South Park is not without its own dark side — maybe the tragic side), the use of silhouettes in black and white, was often very affecting. This is not the computer-animated cutesiness of Disney et al. The film is also a monument to the revolutionary power of pop culture. For one thing, it is the animated film of a graphic novel (comic book) so its very genesis is pop. But, as Frank Zappa was a force in solidarity-era Poland, so our heroine is inspired and consoled by black market tapes of Iron Maiden.

Because the story is a child’s story — I was amazed near the end of the movie when our heroine is about to get married to learn that she is only 21! she had already had experience enough for several lifetimes — the form allows Marjane Satrapi to convey the simplicity of the child’s vision while maximizing the terror that is a child’s experience of war, repression, prejudice.

Like Reading Lolita in Tehran, Persepolis gives one an idea what it’s like for a woman living under a repressive fundamentalist regime and also an idea why leaving the country isn’t all that satisfactory a solution. Nafisi’s vision is more analytical; Satrapi’s gives us raw emotion and some delightfully iconoclastic characters (the grandmother and uncle). There are moments of truly wicked humor in the film.

Satrapi also deals with the clumsiness or just plain evil Middle East involvement of the West, from the installation of the Shah to the arms dealing in the Iran/Iraq War. Her focus is not so strictly domestic. When one of the women says of the religious revolution, “It can’t be any worse than life under the Shah,” I couldn’t help but think of how much worse life is now for women in Iraq since we deposed Saddam Hussein and facilitated a fundamentalist takeover.

I was deeply moved and I think this is a movie that all of us should see, especially now when the Bush administration keeps beating the war drums and painting Iran as the greatest evil in the axis thereof. If you see the human face of your enemy, it is not so easy to hate her.

You will find a number of perceptive reviews and a plot synopsis at Rotten Tomatoes.

Persepolis, by the way, was the Greek name for the ancient capitol of the Persian empire.

Possibly related posts:

The unwisdom of age

Molly Bingham — Home from Iraq

Letters from Iwo Jima

Perpetual hatred

The Intruder

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