READ MORE: Critic's Choice: Best of 2007
WATCH THE TRAILER

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 12/20/07)

Marjane Satrapi's personality — skeptical, sardonic, rebellious, but also loving and cautiously hopeful — is the force that makes her autobiographical graphic novels about her girlhood in Iran and coming of age in Europe so winning. Persepolis, the mostly black-and-white animated film that adapts four of these works, and was written and co-directed by Satrapi with Vincent Paronnaud, has that going for it, too, of course. It also has an evocative and lively score by Olivier Bernet and stellar voice work by Catherine Deneuve, Deneuve's daughter (with Marcello Mastroianni) Chiara Mastroianni, Danielle Darrieux, and Simon Abkarian. As is fitting, Mastroianni voices Satrapi while Deneuve voices Satrapi's mother.

Persepolis and its successors were written in French, and this film, even the Iranian segments, is in French. (There has been talk of an English-dubbed version, featuring Gena Rowlands as Marjane's mother, among others, but this has yet to materialize.) As one of the great things about the world of an animated film is that it's a totally created one, there's not even a hint of the disconnect that would have been unavoidable in a live-action picture. Telling how Satrapi and her family were wrenched out of their often fraught, but largely comfortable existence by the Islamic Revolution; how her relatives and fellow citizens suffered; and how she became a displaced person (the movie is bracketed and interspersed with color sequences of the adult Satrapi wandering around Paris's Orly airport after a quixotic attempt to get on a plane back to Tehran), the story brims with incident and pertinence. As awful as the things that happen in it are, the viewer is happy to be in its world anyway, because Satrapi is such a companionable guide through it.

Satrapi's graphic style is simple — some of the early sequences look like Peanuts with headscarves — but it has legs, more than enough to sustain a 96-minute feature. Production designer Marisa Musy varies things a little with stippled landscapes and shades-of-gray effects that recall the work of Lotte Reiniger.

Persepolis is hardly the most harrowing displaced-person story ever told, but it's not meant to be. It is, as much as anything else, an expression of a personality, an insistence that the singular voice of a single heart has meaning and can speak meaningfully across cultural boundaries both real and created. While avoiding specious bromides about universality, Persepolis insists on communicating with its audience, and insists that communication and empathy are the keys to our survival.

— Glenn Kenny