Persepolis

[sabotabby]

Since you asked, I thought it was incredible, but I expected nothing less owing to how much I loved the comic. It's also a work that can't be separated from the present political context, which is why it requires a more in-depth post than, "Gaaaah. Go see it." (You should go see it, though.)

For those of you unfamiliar with the comic, it's the story of Marjane Satrapi, the daughter of bourgeois Iranian intellectuals. Many of her family members are communists, including some who have been imprisoned for their opposition to the Shah's rule. When massive street protests break out in Tehran, they see it as a sign that they'll finally be free of a cruel dictatorship. Obviously, the revolution doesn't go so well, and the first book is the story of bright, independent young Marjane struggling to survive under a brutally misogynistic theocracy.

The film is visually stunning. It breathes life into the beautiful drawings from the comic. It's so rare to see traditional animation on the big screen these days.

It's also very funny. That was the one thing my friend S. kept commenting on, because there's apparently no other Iranian movie that's funny. But it's a tragic humour, because—SPOILER—the story is basically one horrific event after another, so you laugh, you let your guard down, and then Satrapi delivers a gut-punch.



So here's the context: The U.S. wants a war with Iran for some reason. And we know how France feels about Muslims. (This is a French film.) Within the West, there's an agenda at work that decides which stories about Muslims—particularly about Muslim women—get told and which do not (see: Sunera Thobani).

My friend G. is a refugee from Iran, a feminist, and a communist. Her criticism of the books (I don't know if she's seen the film) is that they are part of that agenda. She hates the mullahs even more than you or I do, but she saw the books as feeding into the Western Orientalist narrative, and also disagreed with me about the portrayal of the Iranian communists, claiming that they came off as naïve and foolish.

Satrapi's politics, though, are progressive as far as I can tell, which sets her apart from the other famous Muslim women—Norma Khouri, Nonie Darwish, Irshad Manji—who could actually be called neo-con mouthpieces. But I was worried that her story could be theoretically used for propaganda purposes. I mean, the timing of its release was suspicious.

Having seen the movie, I'm far more reassured. The only people who come off well are the communists. The film is as scathing towards Western capitalism as it is to the Iranian theocracy, both in terms of how the West thwarted attempts at building democracy in Iran and armed Iran and Iraq against each other, and also in terms of Satrapi's own story of falling apart, and eventually ending up homeless, in Vienna. At one point, her boyfriend suggests fleeing Iran for Europe. She replies that in Iran they're repressed, but in Europe, they don't care if you starve to death on the streets.

If anything, it's a powerful argument against the neo-con agenda. Only the most deeply racist and ideologically blinded could watch the scenes of Tehran getting bombed and think, "hey, this is a force for liberation!" It's the antithesis of the "FEAR IRAN" bollocks that you see on the news (I mean, "Is it time to bomb Iran?" on the front cover of Maclean's? Though I think the ultimate conclusion was "no, even if they have it coming.") It's a very human story about resistance, personal and collective, to oppression. And it's deeply subversive, even if much of the broader political context doesn't appear through Satrapi's first person narrative.

Okay, so let's get to my one big criticism of the film. It's Persepolis I and II condensed into the same movie. They really should have made two. They cut out my favourite scene and spent more time than they should have, I thought, on the Vienna parts. But if my largest criticism of a movie is "it should have been twice as long," that's the kind of criticism that should make you want to run out and see it.