The tainted veil: From a young age, Satrapi's character pushes the limits of Islam.

Comic Relief

Another good but unnecessary adaptation.

by Matt Prigge

It’s a myth that one art form can cross seamlessly into another. Even last year’s 300—quite possibly the most faithful adaptation of anything ever—forgot that in movies, unlike in comics, objects can literally move.

While its minimalist black-and-white drawing style makes it a prime candidate for a translation from comics to film, Persepolis—Marjane Satrapi’s sharp and perceptive French-language memoirs of her childhood and young adulthood in revolution-era Iran—runs into a bit of a snag.

Published in four volumes over three years, the comics had an unapologetically episodic structure, going from one anecdote or random observation to the next while only occasionally bothering to move the “story” forward. That’s wholly welcome in the pick-up-and-put-down world of literature, particularly the serialized breed. But film, which (ideally) demands total surrender of the audience, is less forgiving.

So here’s the good and bad news: The movie version of Persepolis— half-directed, à la Frank Miller and Sin City, by Satrapi herself and voiced by France’s finest—indeed feels like a movie, with a clear throughline and good pacing.

But at what cost? Satrapi and co-director Vincent Paronnaud’s solution in smoothing out the traditionally bumpy comics-to-cinema transition is to emphasize the story more than the anecdotes and little asides, at least half of which are gutted. Such a loss is to be expected when adapting to movie form, but the source thrived mostly on its anecdotes and little asides, which made it into a specific life lived and not simply a tall tale from culturally backwards Iran. Not to mention the most fundamental question of all adaptations: What’s wrong with having only the original? Is it broke?

Which is not to say Persepolis is a failure by any means. Indeed, it still retains a good deal of the power of the source, though it never comes close to equaling it. Like the comics, Persepolis depicts the first-person experiences of a young, increasingly independent woman (voiced, postpuberty, by Chiara Mastroianni) as she watches the distasteful Shah fall to an even more distasteful fundamentalist regime. Her parents (Simon Akbarian and Mastroianni’s real-life mom Catherine Deneuve), along with beloved grandma (Danielle Darrieux), send her off to Europe during her teens, where she experiences different forms of tragedy and ostracism. Finally she heads back home to improbably become a grown woman who writes autobiographical comics that become films.

It’s a wonder just to see a movie about Iran where women sometimes take off their veils (prohibited in the country’s own cinema), to say nothing of scenes of boozy (and therefore illegal) parties. The film dispels the myth of the country as a place where no fun is had ever, though the comics’ bemused, unsentimental tone is partly hampered by a melancholy score that’s pure stock (a factor the originals never had to worry about).

If Persepolis the movie feels only mostly like comics, it definitely looks like them—as though the frames were granted the power of movement. The film takes Satrapi’s doodly illustrations fully and strikingly into another medium. After veils become mandatory, the film dreams up an image of a sea of black punctuated by blank faces—an image you’d think would be in the comics but isn’t. A pair of older women who admonish Satrapi for wearing a punk jacket move like snakes, their limbs devoured by their veils, while a part where she spots an acquaintance’s corpse among fresh rubble has her silent, horrified expression slowly morph into Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Later on, the film finds a way to depict her violent teenaged growth spurt in a way that manages to top the one in the books.

Sadly, the animation is the only department that takes the film to a different level. Everything else is merely a carry-over from the comics—and you’re not getting all of it either. The most puzzling omission is a moving section where Satrapi, while alone (and increasingly destitute) in Europe, receives a prolonged visit from her mother. It’s a lovely respite during one of the darker passages and its deletion points to a gutting of the heart of the comics, all in the name of formatting them to movie shape.

Persepolis is a good film, and probably a great film if you’re unfamiliar with the source. But strong as the film is, it can never overcome feeling superfluous.

Persepolis
B-
Directors: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud
Opens Fri., Jan. 18