Juno stripped.By John DeSando, WCBE's It's Movie Time
". . . an unrealistic face of the achievements and results of the glorious Islamic Revolution." The Iranian government on Persepolis
The graphic novel tradition transposed to film animation set in a stark black and white mise en scene has always interested me with its daring to minimize narrative and yet willingness to dramatize some great issues of life (Sin City is one of the US's versions). Persepolis, an Oscar nominee for best animated feature of 2007, is just such a film: wise about the vagaries of life for an emerging girl in Iran but bold in the parallels to girls everywhere, a Juno stripped of verbal genius, if you will.
This is the autobiography of Marjane Satrapi, whose four graphic novels depict a feisty Iranian girl living through the fall of the Shah, the Iran/Iraq war, the rise of the theocracy, and the eventual suppression of women's rights in a tumultuous society at the crossroads of global evolution.
Besides its reliance on universal issues for emerging girls (she smokes, swears, criticizes her parents, loses at love, loses her virginity, loves her rebellious grandmother, wastes time on TV, visits clubs, lives poorly on her own in Vienna; this life could happen in Columbus), Persepolis dares to suggest that booking out from home won't always be the best plan. Its singular gift is its willingness to be honest about the challenges between childhood and adolescence, and of course young adulthood.
Its sagging middle, with quotidian annoyances and few triumphs of a young woman, is the only caution I give for an otherwise engrossing story about coming of age.
Along the way, the audience gets a concise history of a changing little country, whose current nuclear ambitions make it not so small at all. Nor is the life of Marjane, whose covered Islamic head cannot conceal the mind of a new generation bent on change that makes America's changes small change by comparison.
Although Persepolis will never beat Ratatouille for the Oscar, its execution stands much taller than a mouse and larger than any one character.
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, which can be heard streaming at www.wcbe.org Fridays at 3:01 pm and 8:01 pm and on demand anytime. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com