Persepolis the Revised Editon

With every caption written out, this story of a young Iranian girl’s unique journey captured my heart. Young Marji tells the story of her family through the fall of the Shah, into the grace period of rejoice for her Marxist family, into the dreaded rule of the religious extremists and into the war against Iraq. Her family is very unique, with several imprisoned uncles, a very strong willed grandmother, and a hero filled cast of others. Her story shows the hardships that the people of Iran dealt with and how their innocence was taken away to have the school kids playing torture for fun, and chasing a child with nails. This movie shows how lucky we really are to live in the place we do, with its grand uniqueness in story and style we can see even greater the perils they dealt with in life and look past our stereotypes. For an old style cartoon animated film, in black and white it brings out the best it could from the story.
Though the character’s voiceovers are in French, the tone that the actors use in their speech during the film helped me follow the fast pace of the movie. The use of captions made it hard to keep up with its seemingly quick pace and extremely quick movement from scene to scene. The story of the first half of Persepolis showed the lives of Marji and her family through several important stages in the history of Iran, and it gave us the perspective of the other sides of the issues and of the people of Iran. Many terribly tough situations are thrown into play in this movie, such as the notion of torture, the deaths of martyrs and revolutionaries but the movie puts a spin on them and turns them into somewhat funny images to help lighten them, such as the formation of hand puppets of the Shah. They director also decided to omit several scenes that took the graphic novel it was based on to new heights of horror, such as the scene of the burning down of the movie theater, and the shooting of the protesters. This omission helped not only keep the movie watchable but it kept the gruesomeness down to a level where the public could deal with it.
The special effects and sounds used in the movie help pull out and emphasize the scene that otherwise would feel dry . They are the exact same images that you see when you read the novel which makes it more believable and brings it back to the comic book feel. Because the movie moves so quickly and has captions as subtitles for non French speakers, it is a good idea to read the comic to get the full story and to be able to capture the full meaning and image that the basic picture that you see gives you. The movie still fills your heart with emotion and as Colin Covert of the Star Tribune put it “Satrapi has retained her tragicomic memoir’s universal emotional appeal. Marjane’s story is more tumultuous than most, but it’s one most viewers will identify with.” Covert is emphasizing the commonality of the family’s plight for political and social freedom, and that their situation can be grasped by the public. The beauty of the special effects and the flow of the movie is in its simplicity of the comic style motion pictures. This flow of the simple black and white pictures helps show how simple life was to the Iranians and it helped develop the inner feelings that were supposed to be drawn out of the viewer. The sound of music during several scenes helped bring out emotions like when the family was in trouble of being caught or the montage of “Eye of the Tiger” by Marijane helped bring out the emotion of the scene. Also when there was no sound at all, the pure silence of the scene would take the scene to a new level of emotion as Marijane was lost in herself and lost in the world.
Overall I felt the movie brought out emotion that we may not experience often and did so in very good fashion, especially It brought out the love images of a family, the freedom issues of a country and a people, and the further inner emotions of Marijane as she dealt with being alone and away from her country. The movie further transitioned you decently to get you through such a serious and in depth memoir into an under two hour film, while still getting the emotions out and the dire images out to the viewer. It was a wonderful watch, and if your interested in getting the full story of her childhood and of Iran’s passage the graphic novel will take you to even greater heights.