NEW YORK TIMES
At New York Film Festival: Upheaval in Iran, Fiasco in Westchester
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: October 12, 2007
Aesthetics versus storytelling: as much as anything, that is the issue that defines the 45th New York Film Festival, which winds to a close on Sunday. On the rare occasions when serious aesthetic exploration and an entertaining yarn fuse, as in "Persepolis," the animated closing-night film, everyone should be satisfied.
During a recent screening of "Persepolis," the French film based on Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel about growing up in contemporary Iran, a facetious quote from David Mamet's play "American Buffalo" floated into my mind and lodged there: "The only way to teach these people is to kill them." In the three decades since that play was first produced, those words have come to describe the whiplash effects of political turmoil that is epidemic, especially in the Middle East.
The movie is a semi-autobiographical first-hand account of Iran's troubled history from the days of the shah through the Islamist revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Its narrator, also named Marjane, is a spirited young rebel from a closely knit, middle-class family, struggling to define her identity (at one point she is a punk listening to smuggled Iron Maiden tapes) in a repressive climate whose shifting political winds require wrenching personal adjustments. For a time, she lives as an expatriate student in Vienna.
As one regime supplants another and war rages, many thousands die. Her family's hopes for political and social equilibrium are dashed as retribution is meted out, and enemies, real and imagined, are purged. Marjane eventually leaves Iran to settle in Paris.
For all the pessimism nipping at the movie's edges, the chaos and inhumanity surrounding Marjane are held at bay by familial love, especially the devotion of her wise, hard-headed grandmother, who has seen it all. Chiara Mastroianni is the voice of Marjane as a young adult, and the great French star Danielle Darrieux is the grandmother.
Because it is animated, "Persepolis" is a bold choice for the festival's closing-night selection. "A cartoon?" you may sniff. "How dare they?" But the movie is so enthralling that it eroded my longstanding resistance to animation, and I realized that the same history translated into a live-action drama could never be depicted with the clarity and narrative drive that bold, simple animation encourages.
"Persepolis" makes you contemplate the processes of history. Buried under each wave of "reform," it suggests, are cultural traditions that will eventually resurface no matter how repressive the climate of the moment. The movie is also tacitly feminist in its depiction of Islamist patriarchs as ludicrous misogynist prudes.
"Persepolis" has a lot in common with last year's closing-night film, "Pan's Labyrinth," which portrays life in the wake of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of girl who transmutes fear into ritualized fairy-tale fantasy. Both films are immeasurably enriched by examining war and social upheaval through innocent female eyes.