Princess of Persia

Persepolis – I had always heard good things about Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis; I just never took the time to pick it up. Now having seen the film version, I’ll probably do just that. The animated film (which Satrapi co-directs) follows the travails of a young Marjane growing up in Iran in the late seventies up through the early nineties. If you know nothing about the history of the region around that time, the movie is a real education. Not to say the film is pedantic, because it isn’t. The characters do talk politics, but they don’t feel like ideological mouthpieces. They feel like intelligent people caught up in an absurd and tragic world. We follow the characters (mainly Marjane, her mother and father, her grandmother and a few other family members) through the revolution which saw the expulsion and exile of the Shah of Iran. The initial optimism and faith that the new regime will lift the oppression that has dogged the Iranian people for so long is quickly replaced with dread and resignation once they realize the truth in the old saying that sometimes the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. The most interesting parts of the movie for me were watching the non-conforming and rambunctious Marjane try to create a normal childhood for herself in a rigid fundamentalist Islamic society. The film makes the quiet observation that fundamentalist Islam is just another word for oppressive patriarchy. Sometimes it's laugh-out-loud funny such as when a young teen Marjane goes to the black market to buy Western pop music (illegal and deemed as a symbol of Western decadence that would lead to the moral depravity of the Iranian people). Other times downright scary as you watch how something as simple as a house party (co-ed social mingling was also illegal--still is actually) become a life-or-death situation. I enjoyed it quite a bit upon reflection. Highly recommended. Next up, Dario Argento's trippy Mother of Tears splatterfest. Man, nobody does horror like the Italians.