Iran So Far Away? | Little Marjane Satrapi, with her tapered-oval head, in Persepolis.
David Edelstein, New York | “Persepolis, from the graphic novels of Marjane Satrapi, feels as if it had jumped right from the page to the screen. And since the novels feel as if they had jumped right from Satrapi’s head to the page, the immediacy is startling. If only The Kite Runner could have been freed from its clunky realism!”
David D’Arcy, GreenCineDaily | “Let’s hope that the clever and tender Persepolis reaches the U.S. heartland, or at least deep enough that Dick Cheney has a chance to see it. This is a crucial opportunity. The man from the Dark Side seems determined to leave his mark on history, possibly with an attack on Iran, especially if someone gives him the intel that indicates that a pre-emptive strike on the Islamic Republic would be a slam dunk. Seeing Persepolis might convince him that Iranians are not a separate species that can be scheduled for bombardment. The real achievement in Persepolis is that Satrapi and Parronaud have humanized Iranians through cartoons, at the same time that the Iranian president has been turned into a cartoon (with plenty of help from Ahmadinejad himself).”
Steve Erickson, Gay City News | “Persepolis isn’t any old coming-of-age story, just as Iran is no ordinary country. As the Bush administration lies its way toward a potential military confrontation with that nation, artists like Marjane Satrapi, who can build a bridge between the West and the Muslim world, are a rare breed. She’s far from the only one, but she speaks to a larger audience than novelist Nahid Rachlin or even video artist Shirin Neshat. The film has been condemned by the Iranian government, but self-hatred is the last thing of which its vibrant heroine is guilty. Persepolis shows that one can rebel against Iranian misogyny without capitulating to ‘Axis of Evil’-style rhetoric or idealizing the West.”
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker | “The film is largely in black-and-white, yet the result, far from seeming gloomy, has the pertness and the simplicity of a cutout. I found it, if anything, too simple. The faces are no more than tapered ovals, which makes some of the characters hard to distinguish, and I was left with the nagging, if ungallant, impression that I had been flipping through a wipe-clean board book entitled Miffy and Friends Play With Islamic Fundamentalism. There is no denying the boldness of Persepolis, both in design and in moral complaint, but there must surely be moments, in Marjane’s life as in ours, that cry out for cross-hatching and the grown-up grayness of doubt.”
