PERSEPOLIS
Directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud. Featuring the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux. Opens Fri, Feb 15.
4 Stars

Compared to most women who become the subjects of Oscar-nominated biopics, Marjane Satrapi is a pretty ordinary person. 

She wasn’t the key witness in an against-all-odds lawsuit against a soulless corporation; she never sacrificed her life so that someone else could live; she never invented a life-saving vaccine or nursed wounded soldiers back to health; she wasn’t an inspirational teacher and she never ruled a country; and while she loved rocking out to bootlegged Iron Maiden cassettes in her bedroom, she never became a chart-topping music star. 

As a young girl living in Tehran before and after the fall of the Shah, she was a witness to terrible violence and repression—including the imprisonment and execution of her beloved Uncle Anoosh—but Satrapi never pretends that there’s anything unusual about her story, and certainly nothing heroic. Any bright young Iranian girl probably would have equally sad, funny, and elegiac tales of her own to tell.

But it’s doubtful they could have told them as eloquently as Satrapi has, first in a pair of graphic novels and now in the beautifully animated feature film Persepolis. The film, co-directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, preserves Satrapi’s deceptively simple drawing style—charmingly childlike black-and-white images whose flatness seems inspired equally by Japanese woodcuts and Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek. At a time when computer-animated films like Ratatouille and Surf’s Up strive towards photorealism, Persepolis is a bracing reminder of the expressiveness that can arise from a face composed of nothing more than a couple of ovals and a curved line. 

The episodic plot begins with Marjane as a spunky, wide-eyed, Adidas-wearing seven-year-old, eagerly drinking in her intellectual, leftist parents’ dinner-table conversations about politics, and carrying on imaginary conversations with God as she lies in bed at night. (God’s only rival for Marjane’s affections is Bruce Lee.) When the Ayatollah comes to power, Marjane and her mother reluctantly start wearing veils, even as they continue to indulge in a few furtive pleasures, listening to Western pop music and attending clandestine parties, hoping the police don’t pull them over on their way home and smell the liquor on Marjane’s father’s breath.

Eventually, Marjane’s parents send her to school in Vienna—they rightfully fear that her outspoken nature will soon get her into serious trouble—and she spends an awkward few years bouncing from clique to clique and getting her heart broken by various teenage cads, all the while struggling with her ambivalence toward her Iranian heritage. When she ultimately decides to return home to Tehran, Marjane comes to a painful realization: while she loves her country, it’s become impossible for her to live there.

As I watched Persepolis, I almost wished I had a daughter so that I could take her to see it. If I had a son, he could probably get a lot out of the movie as well, but so few movies deal specifically with the moral education of a female character that Persepolis feels particularly precious. As a young female role model, Marjane ranks right up there with Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird—she has the same impetuousness, the same tendency toward hero worship, the same determination to speak her mind. And then Satrapi goes Mockingbird one better by taking Marjane into adulthood, still trying to make sense of the world and her place in it. (The sequence where Marjane goes through the horrifying transformations of puberty, her limbs and facial features pulled grotesquely this way and that like taffy, is a classic bit of character animation.) 

And Satrapi isn’t afraid to expose her own flaws. There’s a great scene, for instance, where Marjane tells her grandmother (a superb vocal performance by French film icon Danielle Darrieux) how she avoided getting arrested for wearing makeup by telling the cops that a man looked at her salaciously—her grandmother furiously denounces her willingness to throw an innocent man to the police, and denounces her even more for laughing about it. 

Satrapi doesn’t forgive herself for her flaws, but she accepts them—and the flaws and contradictions of all the other characters she meets—as an unavoidable part of human nature. And in so doing, Persepolis provides a not-so-implicit rebuke to the intolerance of the men who seized control of her country. 

When she was little, Satrapi says, she dreamed of growing up to become a prophet; instead, she became a humanist, a storyteller, an artist, and a visual magician. Close enough.