NYFF: Closing-Night Film 'Persepolis'

By Katey Rich

Adaptations of graphic novels for the screen are all the rage�just check out the upcoming slate from Warner Bros.�but Persepolis is not exactly the younger sister of 300 or Sin City. Marjane Satrapi's two-volume memoir about her childhood during Iran's Islamic Revolution has plenty of action and even guns, yes, but is much more a funny and poignant coming-of-age story with universal appeal. Given that Satrapi's film just closed the New York Film Festival, that appeal is clearly extending beyond the usual graphic novel fanboys.

In 1978 Marjane is a spunky nine year old who idolizes Bruce Lee and doesn't understand the fuss about events unfolding outside her family's modest apartment. After the overthrow of the Shah, life becomes more difficult, however, as her beloved uncle is jailed and executed and war erupts between Iran and Iraq. Marjane's parents send her to school in Vienna, but after several misspent years there she returns home, only to find a drastically changed country. Forced to wear a veil at all times and abide by strict Islamic codes, Marjane resists until realizing she must leave Iran for good.

At the press conference following the film's screening, Satrapi explained that until she went to live in France in her twenties, she had a typical false impression of the power of graphic novels. "Before that I had the idea about comics that everyone else has about comics�it's really for kids or adolescents or retarded adults. Then I read [Art Spiegelman's] Maus and it was like a slap in my face, and I realized, it was just a medium like any other to express yourself. In my mind the images and the text, they are not separated. It became an obvious way to express myself."

Satrapi teamed up with French graphic novelist Vincent Paronnaud to direct the film, as a way to distance the film from the highly-personal graphic novel she had spent so many years writing. "We took this project as something independent from the comic," Paronnaud said at the press conference. "Of course, we read the comics again, we had the story, [but] we decided that we were going to start something new out of the story, to find a new territory."

The visual look of the film is fairly different from the graphic novel�you can see pages of the book here-- and is also by far the most stunning aspect of Persepolis. The way images and scenes flow into one another, and moments of time are frozen for emphasis, would be impossible to achieve in live-action film. Despite Paronnaud's contribution, the film remains Marjane's; the power of the animation to bring the audience into the character's head keeps Persepolis a subjective, personal experience�key to a story set in an exotic location during a confusing political era. Satrapi said it best herself: " [If we had done it in live-action] it becomes the story of these people who are far from us, we cannot relate to this, they are not like us, etcetera. It's something very abstract in the drawing that anybody can relate to."

Putting pressure on a small autobiographical film to foster understanding between the United States and Iran is a tall order, but if the film finds an audience and is seen by people who otherwise would not think about Iran, it will be a success," said Satrapi. "If [people] watch this movie and say it's about a human being, and this human being could be me, then we have reached our goal." If any film has a chance of achieving that, it's Satrapi's funny and deeply human Persepolis.