Persepolis

I saw this last night at Brian’s urging. since he was in Edmonton and couldn’t make it. It was, as far as I could tell, sold out, and it’s been interesting to note how much the crowd changes at CIFF with “special interest” screenings: Ukrainians at Orange Revolution, b-boys at Bomb It!, and Iranian people at Persepolis. I love animation, and the story sounded sad and interesting, so I consented, and I’m really glad I did.

I’ve read a few reviews of this film and none seem to have made this comparison, so here’s my contribution: A lot of it reminded me of Hope and Glory, which was a 1987 film with reminiscings of being a little boy during WWII in London and the sort of fun that kids had around the excitement of the blitzes. The first part of Persepolis is like that (”MY uncle was imprisoned by the Shah for nine years- yours was only in prison for seven!”), except it’s from a little girl’s perspective, and the events are the period before the fall of the Shah of Iran and then the Iraq-Iran war. It is, at points, horribly, horribly sad, but as told through the eyes of a precocious, mischievous child, it’s also sweet and charming. As the film continues, it encompasses more of the outside-of-Iran bio of the author (Marjane Satrapi, who wrote/drew the graphic novel on which the film is based) and then her return to Tehran (from Vienna) for university, and this part struck me as more self-indulgent and, frankly, boring, but all in all this is a superb film. It’s in French (Satrapi lives in France now and was schooled in French), which is a bit odd. They even refer to “Dieu” instead of “Allah” or “Khoda.” But it would be even more odd to see it in English, which we’re going to be stuck with here. Unfortunately you won’t be able to see it in theatres here until that dreaded English-language version is released in August 2008 (or so I read on IMDB), which means, I think, that a North American DVD won’t be in the offing until more than a year from now. But I might be misinformed about this. At any rate, I feel really lucky, blessed even, to have seen this film, and whenever you get the chance, please do check it out.