Persepolis (2007)

So holyoutlaw and I saw Persepolis at the Harvard Exit last night. It's a movie based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about her life growing up during the Iran Revolution and its aftermath, including a brief stint going to school in Austria. The movie ends with her move to France in the early '90s. The movie is in French, although we are to understand that the characters speaking French (as opposed to German) are actually speaking Farsi.

It's a sad, often tragic, often grim story, but told with a great sense of humor. It's a coming of age story above all, with a lot of Iranian history threaded in. A long section of the movie takes place during the war between Iraq (the aggressor) and Iran. I remember reading about the war at the time (1980 to I think 1988 or so), and I remembered that Iran didn't have much in the way of weaponry, but they had more people, so they threw waves of people at the front. I remembered reading that it was a war much like WWI in that it was a slog of trench warfare. What never registered on me was that Iraq's airforce and missiles were able to reach Teheran, and that Teheran suffered pretty heavy bombardment. A bit of an eye-opener there.

The movie really puts across what it was like for the educated middle class to go from the repression of the Shah to the repression of the ayatollahs. It gives a strong sense of the attempt to live a liberated life under the watchful eyes of the bearded fanatics, but also, early on, of the naivete of some of the anti-Shah leftists (most prominently, one of Marjane's communist uncles) who expected the people to throw off their shackles and grab their civil liberties. Strangely, while it does delve into the political resistance to the Shah to that extent, it does not really cover the political resistance to the Islamic Republic, which must exist, however covert. It also doesn't raise the issue of how not everybody is as privileged as Marjane to be able to escape the country and go to Europe.

Aside from Marjane herself, the strongest character in the movie is her no-nonsense grandmother, who puts jasmine flowers in her bra to smell sweet and ices her breasts for ten minutes each day to keep them firm. There's a wonderful layer of earthy humor around the grandmother, but also a fierce sense of integrity in the face of appalling indignities and suffering. Her husband too was killed by the Shah, and now she has to watch her beautiful country suffer under the strictures of religious barbarians.

So I've written all this without mentioning that it's an animated movie, although I guess I did mention that it's based on a graphic novel. Marjane Satrapi became an artist in France, and the movie's animation is based on her elegant cartoony line-drawing style, which also has elements of what appear to be ornate Persian design and an almost woodblock printing texture. I really liked the animation, which kept the simplicity of line but also worked in various 2D-3D effects, such as ocean waves represented by different layers of 2D drawings overlapping each other in motion.

Early in the movie, the communist uncle casually mentions to the young Marjane that during his prison time under the Shah his torturers were trained by the CIA. It's a passing comment, but it reminded me that my nation's history of torture didn't start with the current administration. It's just that we used to *always* farm out the torture, instead of doing some of it ourselves. Well, mostly, maybe. It reminded me that maybe all that's really changed is that we no longer pretend that we don't torture.