Review: Persepolis (4/5)

‘Persepolis’ – an animated film about a young girl growing up troubled times – is a marvel

Persepolis
(Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi):
Voices: Sean Penn, Gena Rowlands, Iggy Pop, Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni.
Running time: 95 minutes (12A)

Hands up who wants to be a teenager in Tehran in the 1980s? Not Marji. The hero of the animated marvel Persepolis is a strong-minded young girl who sometimes buckles under the weight of the world. She’s got the Islamic revolution to deal with: it doesn’t like women, imposes the veil and gobbles whatever freedom they had left after the Shah went the way of exile. There’s the bombing of her city on a daily basis by Iraqis and the reality that you can arrive home any day to discover your street is a ruin of rubble. There’s the spies who watch everything through beard. And there’s the stinging issue of her beloved and wise uncle Anoosh, a communist who is taken to prison and executed. After all this, you would expect Marji has earned the right to listen to heavy metal at any volume of her choosing. But it is next to impossible to lay your hands on music. Just what is an angry teenager supposed to do?
Marji has to buy cassettes down an alleyway, where men stand shifty, hands casual in pockets, and let slip the nature of their contraband from the corners of their mouths. “Stevie Wonder”, “Julio Iglesias”, they murmur. And then the magic words: “Iron Maiden”. Buying music is as seedy as buying drugs, but whether or not you live in a totalitarian regime, some things, like being a teenager, just have to be done.
This is the central lesson of Persepolis, a film where teenagers, and by extension people, are the same everywhere. The story was first a series of graphic novels written by Marjane ‘Marji’ Satrapi, who left Iran for France as a young woman. She’s the hero of her own story and gives both vent and visual to a troubled early life. Hers is an earthy personality: when a police man stops her from running, telling her, “Your rear end jiggles – it’s immodest”, she grenades back: “Well, stop staring at my butt”. The film won the jury prize at Cannes and is a piece of pure expressionism, where feelings and real life meet in a swash of black and white ink: beards and shawls become chunky blacks; trees an ornate curlicue.
Things were tough during the Shah regime but you could still watch Bruce Lee and wear Adidas sneakers. His downfall was celebrated because some Iranians believed freedom would come next. “Whatever the outcome is, it can’t be worse than the Shah,” says her mother, unwittingly tempting a kick in the backside from fate.
Later we see her mother, diminished by the veil, fending intolerable abuse from a strange man on the street. She is at the behest of a regime where misogyny comes cruel and casual. She decides, with her photographer husband, that this is not the life they want for Marji. So she is exiled to school in Vienna, but privilege comes at a price.
She goes through puberty on her own, shown hilariously as an instance of sprouting grotesquerie. She comes out of first love a damaged shell and ends up living on the streets. Is she dysfunctional? Who wouldn’t be? She wants to go home to Iran.
The moment of arrival is stained by the policeman at the desk in airport arrivals: “Are you carrying any forbidden items?” comes the quiz. “Alcohol, playing cards, music, films, cosmetics, pornography, pork products?” Yikes. I can live without cosmetics. But pork products? The moment is a neat distillation of why people endure dictatorships: home is still sweeter than any place else.
“Persepolis” is an ancient name for Iran; here it becomes an imaginary faultline which Marji has to straddle: she has tasted the fruit of freedom in Europe, but must learn to stomach the acid of totalitarianism. Yet rather than resort to anger, she adopts her grandmother’s advice: never lower yourself to your antagonist’s level.
So we get ridicule with a light touch. At an art school lecture, the nudity of Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ is scored out in black marker. Another scene unfolds in a life drawing class: a circle of white boards and scribbling hands and a woman on a plinth in the centre – she is covered head to toe in shawl. This vibrant young woman has to live in a culture that tries to deny she exists. You ask yourself the question: if you are not allowed to exist physically, then how can you have a mental life too? So Marji decides to leave for good.
Her final departure is painful, but it might have been worth it: Persepolis is a beautiful and bold piece of work, a staggering coming-of-age story told
in a staggering political time. It gives the lie to a dangerous belief we hold in the west: you cannot tar an entire people by the nature of its political regime.