'Tis the season, apparently, for incredibly unique French films with fresh, original voices. I mean really. Last night, exactly one month after seeing The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I caught a sneak preview of this new animated French flick called Persepolis. Ye must catch this sucker post haste. It's terrific. And don't let the fact that it's in black and white animation scare you away. Soon enough you'll get so immersed in the story you won't be able to imagine it in any other format.
Here's the scoop on Persepolis. Back in 2003 or 2004, this Iranian-born French gal in her thirties named Marjane Satrapi (pronounced mar-ZHAN SAHT-rapee) published a pair of memoirs about her coming of age in Iran, and a bit in Vienna, during the eighties and early nineties. But these weren't your garden variety memoirs, mind you. They were graphic memoirs. In other words, she wrote them in the format of a comic book, with drawing panels and dialogue balloons and what have you. And in black and white.
The first tome was entitled Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. This basically covers 1978 or so until Marji, as her family and friends call her, goes off to a French high school in Vienna in the mid eighties. So basically it starts when she's eight, and when the Shah of Iran is about to go bye-bye thanks to a little thing called the Islamic Revolution. Her parents are very politically active and, like a lot of Iranians, are all for the Shah's overthrow. Adding to her family's interesting dynamic is that Marji's directly descended from the last emperor of Iran. Anyway, if 
you know anything about the government that replaced the Shah's, it's a classic example of "Be careful what you wish for." If anything, things just got worse after the Revolution. Further, Iran no sooner came under a new regime than it was thrust into a brutal war with it's next-door neighbor Iraq, a war which consumed tons of lives and most of the 1980s. Anyway, we see all this through little Marji's eyes. She's a monster Bruce Lee fan and soon falls under the spell of Iron Maiden. That is, after she gets the Bee Gees bug out of her system. Plus, she positively idolizes her Uncle Anouche, an unabashed Communist who lived in the Soviet Union for a spell. He regales our young Marji with tales of his adventures, which include various stints in jail. As you can probably guess, Anouche is really pulling for the Shah's undoing because he thinks it will mean a more socialist-type government for Iran under which equality will reign. He couldn't have been more wrong.
you know anything about the government that replaced the Shah's, it's a classic example of "Be careful what you wish for." If anything, things just got worse after the Revolution. Further, Iran no sooner came under a new regime than it was thrust into a brutal war with it's next-door neighbor Iraq, a war which consumed tons of lives and most of the 1980s. Anyway, we see all this through little Marji's eyes. She's a monster Bruce Lee fan and soon falls under the spell of Iron Maiden. That is, after she gets the Bee Gees bug out of her system. Plus, she positively idolizes her Uncle Anouche, an unabashed Communist who lived in the Soviet Union for a spell. He regales our young Marji with tales of his adventures, which include various stints in jail. As you can probably guess, Anouche is really pulling for the Shah's undoing because he thinks it will mean a more socialist-type government for Iran under which equality will reign. He couldn't have been more wrong.The second memoir is called Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. This pretty much picks up where the first left off. Marji's now at a French high school in Vienna. As you can imagine, it's that proverbial duck out of water story. Just as she was getting used to wearing a veil back in Tehran, she's now in a society where the veil makes her as self-conscious as all get-out. Still, don't think she's docile or anything. In the West we tend to have this stereotype of the conservative veil-clad Muslim female as very timid and submissive, to the point of avoiding eye contact even. Well, you can forget about that with Marji. Just like her liberal activist parents, Marji is the last person who's afraid to speak her mind. You gonna give her shit? Be prepared to take it back ten-fold. This explains why she has such a tough time finding a place to live in the
Austrian capital. First she starts out bunking with some Catholic nuns. That goes over just about as smoothly as a lead balloon on a planet with gravity ten times that of Earth's. When the nuns give her shit about Muslims being lesser people or something, Marji tells them how she's always thought nuns were former whores. Really, I was dying. What a firecracker, right? Part of the finding-a-place-to-stay adventure includes a stint of homelessness. Eventually she finds a room for rent in the house of this middle-aged single woman who's a lunatic or something. Anyway, now Marji's becoming interested in guys and promptly gets deflowered by some chap who wanted to make sure he was gay. After sleeping with Marji, he tells her, in the words of Ellen DeGeneres, "Yep! I'm gay!" Meanwhile at school, she falls in with a clique of punks that includes this one mohawked guy who's a nihilist. This is just when Kurt Waldheim, who was an officer in the German army during WWII, becomes President of Austria. The peeps in Marji's new punk clique are bemoaning this guy's becoming their leader, but compared with what Marji's seen back in Iran, it seems small potatoes. Anyway, she falls in and out of love some more and eventually gets back to Tehran, where she has to readjust herself to a very conservative society. It's slow going, particularly because Marji hasn't lost one iota of her take-no-shit attitude. At one point, right? She's running to catch a bus that's about to leave. A couple of cops nearby tell her to slow down because her butt is making obscene movements or something. No, really. That's their reason for wanting her to miss the frickin' bus. How does Marji respond in kind? "Well then don't look at my ass!"
Austrian capital. First she starts out bunking with some Catholic nuns. That goes over just about as smoothly as a lead balloon on a planet with gravity ten times that of Earth's. When the nuns give her shit about Muslims being lesser people or something, Marji tells them how she's always thought nuns were former whores. Really, I was dying. What a firecracker, right? Part of the finding-a-place-to-stay adventure includes a stint of homelessness. Eventually she finds a room for rent in the house of this middle-aged single woman who's a lunatic or something. Anyway, now Marji's becoming interested in guys and promptly gets deflowered by some chap who wanted to make sure he was gay. After sleeping with Marji, he tells her, in the words of Ellen DeGeneres, "Yep! I'm gay!" Meanwhile at school, she falls in with a clique of punks that includes this one mohawked guy who's a nihilist. This is just when Kurt Waldheim, who was an officer in the German army during WWII, becomes President of Austria. The peeps in Marji's new punk clique are bemoaning this guy's becoming their leader, but compared with what Marji's seen back in Iran, it seems small potatoes. Anyway, she falls in and out of love some more and eventually gets back to Tehran, where she has to readjust herself to a very conservative society. It's slow going, particularly because Marji hasn't lost one iota of her take-no-shit attitude. At one point, right? She's running to catch a bus that's about to leave. A couple of cops nearby tell her to slow down because her butt is making obscene movements or something. No, really. That's their reason for wanting her to miss the frickin' bus. How does Marji respond in kind? "Well then don't look at my ass!"Among other things, her return stint in Tehran sees her falling for yet another guy, whom she's convinced is the One. So at 21, she gets married. Unfortunately, the One turns out to be the Total Loser. When Marji becomes inconsolable after the divorce, her grandma tells her that the first marriage is really practice for the next one. That grandma, by the way, was one of my favorite characters in the film. Talk about hilariously blunt. She is obviously the one from whom Marji inherits her zero-bullshit tolerance. Anyway, Persepolis 2 ends in the early nineties, when Marji's in her early twenties and decides, with the support of her parents, to pursue a new life in Paris. She still lives in Paris today.
The film is adapted from both memoirs and still only manages to be 90 minutes. It's book-ended by color-animated scenes at the Paris airport where Marji sits and smokes a cigarette and reminisces on her life up to that point. I'm not really hip on the who's who in French movie acting, but I did recognize a couple names. Marji's ma is voiced by Catherine Deneuve. Dad is voiced by Simon Abkarian. That name may not sound familiar offhand, but if you saw Casino Royale, you know who he is. Remember Alex Dimitrios, that minor bad guy early on whom Daniel Craig was spying on in the Bahamas? And then kills at that body exhibit in Miami? That's Simon Abkarian. During the movie's second half, when Marji is a teenager and young adult, she's voiced by Catherine Deneuve's real-life daughter, Chiara Mastroianni. Chiara's dad, by the way, was Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, who was in Federico Fellini flicks like La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2.
After the screening, there was a Q&A with Marji herself, who co-wrote the script and co-
directed the film with her best pal Vincent Paronnaud. Vince was there too, all clad in black with black-rimmed glasses and facial hair and looking very much like a youthful Leon Trotsky. Also there was Chiara Mastroianni, very slim and model-like. Like Vince and Marji, she was wearing all black. All three French people were wearing black, and the two Americans in the Q&A--the moderator and Vince's translator--were wearing stuff that wasn't black. The moderator was a movie critic from LA Weekly whose name slips my mind but looked just like that actor Greg Germann from Ally McBeal.
directed the film with her best pal Vincent Paronnaud. Vince was there too, all clad in black with black-rimmed glasses and facial hair and looking very much like a youthful Leon Trotsky. Also there was Chiara Mastroianni, very slim and model-like. Like Vince and Marji, she was wearing all black. All three French people were wearing black, and the two Americans in the Q&A--the moderator and Vince's translator--were wearing stuff that wasn't black. The moderator was a movie critic from LA Weekly whose name slips my mind but looked just like that actor Greg Germann from Ally McBeal.When the Greg Germann lookalike asked her how the whole movie project got off the ground, Marji explained that she'd gotten a ton of offers from various studios and production companies to adapt her memoir into something live action. She resisted because she was scared the movie version would be something like Not Without My Daughter, the 1991 film with Sally Field that was itself based on a memoir set in the eighties and featured Alfred Molina as a tyrannical Iranian guy. Anyway, simultaneous with these offers, her pal Vince Paronnaud was getting the movie bug. He wanted to go into the movie biz and was looking for something, anything, to produce. At first Marji just wanted to join him for the ride. She didn't care what movie they made so long as they could do it together. Apparently they're that tight. Then it occurred to them that maybe they could take on Persepolis themselves. They wrote the screenplay together and directed it together. When writing the script and animating the film, they tried not to be so slavish to the drawing panels from the two memoirs. Vince said he read them once or twice and then set them aside and never looked at them during the production. For her part, Marji decided soon into the production that trying to be too faithful to the memoirs just wasn't practical, as the film of course would end up far too long. I remember her specifically saying that if you try to cram "five books into a movie, it's always a disaster. It's always better to be frustrated at having to leave things out than to include all five books in a movie."
Chiara talked about how she approached her role as the teenage/young adult Marji. She basically had to read the lines by herself in a studio. To help her out, the real Marji was there with the script and read any and all lines from all the scenes that Chiara was in, just so Chiara 
had someone to react to. Chiara said that Marji wasn't such a bad actor herself, but Marji played that down. "Of course that's not true," she said. As for making her voice sound different in the teenager part of the movie versus the young adult part, Chiara said she didn't even bother trying to alter the pitch of her voice to make herself sound younger because it sounded too obviously phony. So for the teen scenes, she just talked faster. That's basically all she did, and let me tell you, it worked. While watching the movie, I thought the young adult dialogue was being read by the real Marji. It never occurred to me that Chiara would've handled both. She was otherwise very quiet during the Q&A, looking glamorous and keeping to herself. Sitting in the front row, I could easily see the facial resemblance to her mom.
had someone to react to. Chiara said that Marji wasn't such a bad actor herself, but Marji played that down. "Of course that's not true," she said. As for making her voice sound different in the teenager part of the movie versus the young adult part, Chiara said she didn't even bother trying to alter the pitch of her voice to make herself sound younger because it sounded too obviously phony. So for the teen scenes, she just talked faster. That's basically all she did, and let me tell you, it worked. While watching the movie, I thought the young adult dialogue was being read by the real Marji. It never occurred to me that Chiara would've handled both. She was otherwise very quiet during the Q&A, looking glamorous and keeping to herself. Sitting in the front row, I could easily see the facial resemblance to her mom.Someone toward the back of the audience asked Marji about her relationship to her parents today. She said there was no drama there. They're still in touch regularly, and they even visit now and again. I don't remember if she said she ever visited them in Tehran, but I don't think so. Whenever she does see them, they make the trip to Paris. As for her grandma, she passed away in the early nineties, very soon after Marji relocated to Paris.
One of Marji's loyal readers from the audience said she really liked Embroideries and wondered if Marji had any plans to make a movie out of that one. Embroideries is a graphic memoir Marji published in 2006. It basically features Marji's mom, grandma, aunts, and their gal pals all sitting around and drinking tea and talking about their adventures with men, real dishy female stuff, all while Marji waits on them. So most of it is told in flashbacks depicting whatever drama whichever gal at the time is relating. As for making it into a movie, Marji couldn't even think about it. Maybe, maybe not, but one thing at a time. Persepolis came out in European theaters earlier this year, and it was just now coming out in American theaters, and between all that she had to do a ton of traveling to promote the thing. The way she put it was that her soul was poor. That's exactly what she said. "My soul is poor from all the traveling and promotion." Whenever this was done and behind her, she had to kick back, smoke a cigarette, and make her soul rich again before she could think about her next movie or writing project.
Marji's got other comic book stuff if you're interested. In addition to Persepolis, Persepolis 2, and Embroideries, she wrote this other graphic memoir called Chicken with Plums, about the last eight days in the life of her great uncle Nasser Ali Khan. And she wrote a kid's book called Monsters are Afraid of the Moon. It's about this little girl named Marie who gets fed up with all the monsters that invade her room at night when it's dark. So she gets a pair of scissors, cuts the moon out of the night sky, and hangs it above her bed. Sure enough, the moonlight discourages the monsters from bugging her at night. But depriving the night sky of its moon has opened up a whole new can of nightcrawlers...
