Persepolis the movie

I cannot wait to see this - I interviewed her once back when Persepolis was first published in English. A raucous, lovely woman.

I must read all of the book sometime. From skimming it, I was kind of struck by Satrapi being a distinctly not nice person, on the basis of a couple of incidents and impressions. One would be general narcissism, but the particualar one that strikes is one where she falsely accuses some random bloke who was minding his own business of making lewd suggestions to her; said bloke is then carted off by cops and probably then put to the torture. Nice.

I'd also like to read an account of life in Iran by a woman from a more proletarian background who, thanks to the revolution, found herself able to go to college and stuff like that.

I read that incident as a kind of wake-up call for her - remember, she returned home and got torn a new one by various relations and felt wrong, wrong, wrong. This is the problem with skimming...

OF COURSE you would like to read a 'non-privileged' account - so would we all, but I hate it when white Euro men do that shell game of 'oh, not THAT woman!' when presented with female erudition from a class background 'superior' to their own.

Vicar, both in the movie and and the comic she is propmtly chastised by her grandmother for the incident, and realizes how thoughtless she has acted. I think including that scene (as well as others which show how mean she could be) was quite important in her portraying herself as a flawed human being, instead of just valorizing herself, which she could've easily done too.

i thought this was great.

i interviewed her in september about it. everyone warned me about her but i thought she was really cool!

so would we all, but I hate it when white Euro men do that shell game of 'oh, not THAT woman!' when presented with female erudition from a class background 'superior' to their own.

hey, no one's class background is superior to mine. And who you calling whitey?

and yes to everyone, skimming is dangerous, and books with main characters who are not paragons of virtues are not necessarily bad books.

In fact the opposite may be true.

i interviewed her in september about it. everyone warned me about her but i thought she was really cool!

Can you tell us more? Is your interview online by any chance?

it won't be till january when the film comes out here.

she was very funny and smart. and obviously had dealt with a lot of really stupid interviewers who asked her very stupid questions about iran.

DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEA THE EXTENT TO WHICH I YEARN, YEARN TO SEE THIS?

40%

looking forward to this

is this getting a wide release in the us? can't wait to see it, satrapi is hella fierce

I'd also like to read an account of life in Iran by a woman from a more proletarian background who, thanks to the revolution, found herself able to go to college and stuff like that.

-- The Real Dirty Vicar, Friday, October 19, 2007

but that would give the (false) impression that this would have been more likely after the revolution rather than before

But after the revolution the Islamic regime did actually expand higher education, both for men and women. Even if that education was segregated, it was available to larger numbers of women than previously. It also inadvertantly created a cohort of educated bolshy women who now challenge their status in the Islamic Republic. This is life.

as i remember the book (and i havent read it in a while), she gives a fairly "evenhanded" account of the revolution--which is to say that when it first started it provided hope to a lot of iranians, educated and non, working-class and bourgois, but as it became co-opted by the militant islamists like khomeini (or, to be more accurate, as khomeini consolidated power and, once the revolution had ended, eliminated his enemies), the educated, cosmopolitan middle-class (and the marxists among the working-class) became much less supportive. she's not cut-and-dry "the revolution was a bad thing and we all hated it" really, as i recall. but like i said, i havent read it in a while.

i don't think i agree w/ your understanding of the outcomes of the revolution, DV, but since it's sorta vague what your understanding is i guess i'll let it drop

I think Vicar's point was quite clear, why do you think he's wrong, Vahid?

Max, I think the book is quite accurate in describing that the revolution was broadly supported (Satrapi's parents and relatives certainly supported it) for various reasons, but like you said it was the Islamists who reaped the benefits of it. Of course they had lots of support too, but to call it an Islamic revolution would distort what really happened, and one of the good things about the comic and the movie is that they'll probably help a lot Westerners not that familiar with the history of Iran to understand it better.

According to IMDB the movie will be dubbed into English, and one of the voice actors is Iggy Pop! I wonder who he's going to play, the dad? Seems like an odd choice.

Loved the first book. The protagonist becomes somewhat insufferably unsympathetic in the second book. Curious to see the film, though.

This was terrific; I just wish I hadn't done the text like three weeks before seeing the film!

Dubbing into English has the potential to ruin two terrifically funny things about this (the Englishman's French accent and, possibly, the "Eye of the Tiger" rendition).

Besides, there is something funny about watching a film of this and still having to read the dialogue in subtitles.

(P.S.: this was also fun to see early Christmas morning after stepping through a portal into an alternate movie-theater dimension where everyone is either Persian/Iranian, Jewish, or me)

Yeah, I can't see how the "Eye of the Tiger" bit would work, if Marjane speaks perfect English for the rest of the film.

I think Persepolis has been relatively succesful in Europe, if Satrapi & Paronnaud get to do a follow-up, I'd love to see an expanded adaptation of Embroideries. Though maybe they'll want to do some original project instead of just adapting her comics for the screen.

This was really wonderful. The animation was gorgeous, and while I was only briefly intimate with the original comic book (I read most of the first one and skimmed the second), I felt like I was coming to an entirely new piece of work.

Quick question: We watched with, um, homemade subtitles and I'm curious whether the original French (or hell, original subtitles) had the same amount of vulgarities as the version we watched. (A lot of fairly severe profanities: Including the use of 'cunt' throughout the film.)

here's an interview i did: http://www.montrealmirror.com/2008/011008/film1.html

You are a Canadian, I’m talking to you.

I'm going to use this on you from now on.

It's a very good film. I saw it with subtitles, a few months back, and I don't remember there being very much profanity in it, although my French is a bit limited. The English diplomat's accent had the (English) audience pissing themselves.

I don't know any French, but I think the Finnish subtitles had several profanities as well, so I assume they were in the original text.

pretty super, loved the magic lantern-style historical stuff.

ya.

You know, ever week I get more annoyed by the idea of the English version

like a remake?

They're just replacing the voice acting, so far as I can tell:

Sean Penn = father
Iggy Pop = uncle
Gena Rowlands = grandmother
Catherine Deneuve = mother, again, but this time with inexplicable French accent

Ohio = Iran
Indiana = Iraq
Wales = Austria

Breakout role for Ohio!

Check this shit out!

Mesilla Fountain Theatre
February 22 through February 28
Nightly at 7:30pm
Sunday matinee at 2:30 only
Persepolis

Coming to a city near meeeeeeeeee!

great great movie,perfectly balanced.the animation and humor keeps the movie from being melodramatic, and the script is pure,simple and most importantly authentic.
black and white is a great choice for the animation,concerning the fact it's mostly a teenager POV,and the symbolism invloved.

smart sparing use of colour

I think one of my favorite blogging critics has a point, tho I wouldn't go quite so far:

By this point I was ready to pop Persepolis on my top ten list and declare an unexpected victory for the middlebrows. Unfortunately, once the story shifts into full-on memoir mode, as is the popular fashion, it becomes almost unbearably self-indulgent and largely uninviting. If the point is that Marjane, despite her specific historical circumstances, has to go through everything that any other young woman would have to, fine. But that doesn't make the film's rote coming-of-age gestures any more revelatory.

http://academichack.net/reviewsJanuary2008.htm#Persepolis

he'd preferred a straighter history lesson? her personal experience is the whole point. it's the whole story.

He was hoping for My Dinner With Rafsanjani

i mean... i guess i can see his point if he's not too into the austria stuff. but im not sure where else the story could have gone

part of the movie's power is that it's a story about exile & return; it provides the whole framing (which the comic doesn't really, in the same way).

yeah, re Austria ... I think the Dream Boy who discovers he's gay with her particularly seemed like Surefire Yuks.

Unfortunately, once the story shifts into full-on memoir mode, as is the popular fashion, it becomes almost unbearably self-indulgent and largely uninviting. If the point is that Marjane, despite her specific historical circumstances, has to go through everything that any other young woman would have to, fine. But that doesn't make the film's rote coming-of-age gestures any more revelatory.

I liked the Austrian parts almost more than the Iranian parts! It's kinda sad that a lot of the stuff with the anarchists and punks was left off from the film. Who cares if it's a typical coming-of-age story if it's as well-written as Persepolis is? Seems like whoever wrote that comment thought the only worth in the story was the fact that Satrapi is an Iranian who lived through the revolution, whereas I think the best thing in the comic and the movie is that she's a great storyteller and artist. I'd have no problems reading non-Iranian, non-political comics from her. Though the stuff she's done after Persepolis, like Embroideries (which was great), and Chicken and plums (which was kinda meh) focuses on Iran too. I hope she won't be pigeonholed as an artist who's only worth is in her exotic background, that'd be kinda sad.

yeah i got a whiff of that from that comment as well. and the middlebrow line seems like a pretty cheap shot.

(tho i like that dude's other writing on the page morbius linked to.)

Fantastic. And even more fantastic was that a French film with subtitles played in Tupelo, Mississippi.

I collared the assistant manager after it was over and asked him if the booking decisions for that Malco were made locally or at some regional HQ. He was immediately suspicious of me, thought I wanted to give him shit for playin' a furrin film (that you had to READ!), but I reassured him that it was because I wanted to thank whoever booked it. So now to find an email address for the Memphis office.

Saw this last night. Awful. Terribly vain narration. The wise Grandmother was ridiculous. Jokes not funny. No one laughed in the packed screening I went to.

Maybe the French version is better, but the dialogue in the English version, which is what I saw, was so wooden and film school it was embarrassing.

They don't seem to have changed the timing animation for the new voice acting, so there are lots of incidents of characters talking over each other

I have only seen the french version and it suffered from none of the problems you described, the jokes seemed to work in frnch even with a subtitles reading audience so maybe the english is the problem.

Saw the American dubbed version and liked it. Didn't love it. It looked fantastic, moved along at a decent clip and kept me involved in the story. But at the same time, it was a bit shallow and predictable/familiar. Overall, it got by more on a bland kind of agreeableness than a unique point-of-view or any really interesting ideas. Like a good television show, or a better-than-average romantic comedy. Those aren't necessarily damning criticisms, though. I had a good time and would like to see the undubbed original for comparison.

cant remember if i saw french or english version.

dumbfounded by the average romcom comparison.

I saw the dubbed version and didn't really like it. It got by on the strength of its lovely drawings, but never made anything cinematic of them. Too many scenes felt like boxed-in comic strips, with no breathing space around them. The tone too, felt uncertain. If you're going to resort to personal, retrospective voiceover, the narrator's relationship with the unfolding story needs to be something more interesting than "and then I did this ... around this time I was feeling this way". Even a straightforward wistfulness might have worked, but the music wasn't supporting that approach. By the end, the initial freshness had long worn off and Marjane had become a bit of a bore.

Was no one else bothered by how much of a fan of herself Satrapi clearly is?

Yes, a little.

Average romcom gets by on charm. Stock, likeable characters (with a few equally simplistic villians thrown in for measure). A female protagonist one can easily relate to. Also often display the kind of narrow-focus self-obsession that eventually made the narrator of Persepolis seem like such a bore.

criticizing an autobiographical work for being self-obsessed seems like missing the point.

if you hadn't known satrapi was writing about herself, or if it was entirely fictional, would you have had the same problem?

I think I would have had the same problem, yes. I mean, it's presented as an autobiography within the story, so it might just as well have been fiction. And when I read or watch this kind of fiction, I'm more interested in ideas about experience than experience itself. And in the absence of interesting ideas, I at least want a strong point of view and a unique way of processing/understanding the world. This movie didn't give me any of that. It just seemed like someone's intermittently-charming story about how rad they were in their youth. Take away the appeal of exotica, the appeal of unusual autobio and the appeal of "author drew these pictures", and the story/ideas/POV were all very ordinary. Even dull.

if you hadn't known satrapi was writing about herself, or if it was entirely fictional, would you have had the same problem?

I didn't actually know beforehand that it was autobiographical, though through the course of the film it became fairly obvious, so I'm not sure this question can be answered.

My story criticisms take nothing away from the art, mind. Loved the drawing in the original comix, loved the way it was animated in the film. As far as I'm concerned, Persepolis is a GREAT piece of cartoon art. Worth watching and rewatching for the images alone. But the story is rarely more than pleasant.

Do give it points for making it very easy to understand why one would choose to live in a very repressive society (presuming that one really had and could undertand the choice in the first place - M. Satrapi was rather unique among her family/friends in that regard). The film does a good job of normalizing and de-emphasizing the other/exotic aspects of Iranian culture - aspects that would be fetishized and foregrounded in most American films. In that regard, as a laudable "lesson movie", I got something positive out of it.

I liked it up til she went to Europe.

i thought it was a fairly normal coming-of-age story set against a very different backdrop than you usually see these stories. if satrapi had grown up in hoboken, ya, i would agree with you. but i think telling a conventional story in a place and during a time like iran in the 70s/80s was a pretty effective way of illuminating her country and society at the time. and it had nothing to do with "the appeal of exotica."

xp

I liked it up til she went to Europe.

-- Stevie T, Monday, 19 May 2008 17:00 (29 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

I agree with this, the second book is vastly inferior to the first one which correlates.

XP: You're valuing the social history lesson and de-emphasizing the exotica angle, which is fine. But I think they're both there, even inextricable from one another. And I don't think either one is "better" than the other. Exotica has a bad rap lately, for good reasons, but it's a big part of how we understand that-which-is-not-us, at least at first.

define

unless you think just setting something in, or presenting in any way, another culture is exotica.

I liked that it had "Eye of the Tiger" in it.

I was also amused at my own reaction when she went to university to study fine art. "what kind of stupid thing to study is that?" I thought, "she'll never make a living out of that".

Exotica, to me, is the appeal/interest/intrigue of something that is culturally alien, based on the simple fact that it IS culturally alien (i.e., exotic). And yes, when you you say, "just setting something in, or presenting in any way, another culture," you're more-or-less defining the exotic. The exotic is not-us. It is the other, as in "another culture".

A lot of people seem to want to believe that "exotica" is bad, morally wrong somehow. I disagree. Exotica is simply a manifestation of cultural unfamiarity, of difference and distance. When we see other cultures (note the construct: "we" vs. "other"), we notice first the most extreme and colorful points of difference. If we never look past that stage, we get caught in exotica, a way of seeing that can dehumanize the "other". But as a natural part of the process of cross-cultural familiarization, there's nothing wrong with it.

Yeah, Eye of the Tiger bit was rad. So was the fake Iron Maiden tape.

i didn't have this reaction to the books at all; it the movie just that different?

My reaction to the dialogue was often, "you can type that shit, but you can't say it", so yes and no.

i found this pretty disappointing. it's been a while since I read the books so it's hard for me to tell what exactly they left out, but the movie has a weird distinction of seeming like it left out a bunch of really important stuff while still seeming way too long (it felt much much longer than 90 minutes to me for some reason). It's alright but, you know, I was hoping for more.

Whoa. By a weird coincidence I just finished watching it a half hour ago, thought about posting in this thread, but then thought, eh, why bump it.

The animation style was really great, and overall I thought it was a decent film. But I agree somewhat with what you're saying, especially re: what they chose to not use from the book, and what they did choose to add or embellish. Particularly that sequence of Satrapi wandering around homeless and what they did her taking pills and depression... really different, and a little overwrought compared to how it was done in the book.

On the DVD they show storyboards of a a planned suicide sequence that was to occur before she talks to God in her dream, wakes up, dances to Eye of the Tiger, etc. It was cut because Satrapi felt it was too personal and ineffective, but the way the movie portrays it, she just had a crazy dream, woke up, and "GOT OVER IT", while in the comic she drank liquor, tried to slit her wrists in a bathtub and failed, then swallowed a large number of pills and survived nonetheless. It's the doctor telling her it's a miracle she survived the overdose that motivates her to move on.

Though I agree with another poster who said the first book is definitely better than the second and the movie reflects this (but they still cut out almost everything with her husband and a lot of the art school stuff), and I understand they had to appeal to the more emotional moments to make it into more of a film and give it structure, it was a bit disappointing.

I forgot to say that the suicide sequence was super symbolic and referenced all the other events of the story, and was very cinematic - though besides the drinking, it still didn't actually depict things in the matter-of-fact way the book did. And the message from God part was still in.

Take away the appeal of exotica, the appeal of unusual autobio and the appeal of "author drew these pictures", and the story/ideas/POV were all very ordinary. Even dull.

^^^this. Not bad per se but it had little to recommend it besides a nice design sense. Terrible pacing, plot had no forward momentum or central conflict to maintain my interest. By the end it just seemed like a series of disconnected vignettes ("and then this happened, and then I did this... and then this happened...") and ended totally abruptly. fwiw I have not read the comics.

as far as animated-autobios-from-the-middle-east go I am way more interested in that Lebanon civil war one that just came out

also thought it was weird that the Iranian revolution is covered without any character ever uttering a single mention of Khomeini.

Just got done watching this and I have to say I kinda agree with Shakey Mo, especially in regards to the "and then this happened, and then I did this... and then this happened", never really seemed like the story was being pushed forward, just reviewed. I mean I liked it well enough and found the animation to be pretty great, but it certainly wasn't the story that kept me gripped.

NOOOOOO. :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzHPzZS77ys