Persepolis redefines what a war movie, a coming-of-age drama, an animated picture can look like. It seems only fitting that a film about identity, and the struggle that comes along with being multiple different things at the same time, would resist fitting neatly into a box.
Marji is an opinionated, spirited little girl growing up in Tehran before the Islamic Revolution. There are growing tensions around her as the country inches closer to chaos, but as a young girl, she has no other lens through which to view her world. The frequent arrests, suspicions, and propaganda are just another part of her childhood landscape. Then things…change. Religious fundamentalists take power, which dramatically constrains the life she could hope to live.
Girls must wear headscarves. Girls must not wear makeup. Girls must not run. Western films and music are banned. Slowly, insidiously, rights that they had previously enjoyed are taken away. And once the brutal, pointless conflict with Iraq begins, killing hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians and leaving deep psychological scars on Iran that linger to this day, Marji is coming of age in a war zone.
What the film accomplishes here is establishing in a really profound way the immense capacity humans have to adapt to their surroundings. With the world seemingly falling down around them, her family soldiers on, hoping that somehow things will get better and hiding from reality with secret parties and contraband alcohol. It’s shocking how quickly all of this becomes their new normal.
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It’s only when Marji gets in trouble at school for speaking out against the government and her parents fear for her arrest that they send her to a French school in Europe to finish her education. There she’s met with an entirely new set of problems, including but not limited to judgmental nuns and entitled classmates who think they’re wise but seem completely unaware of their own privilege.
Persepolis intimately details the experience of being an outsider everywhere you go. When Marji moves to Austria, experiencing the western world is a massive culture shock. Her face, her hair, and her language immediately identify her as an Other. She grows tired of being “the Iranian”, the token representative of a nation that has oppressed her, subject to any and all probing questions from curious onlookers.
But when she returns to Tehran, she doesn’t exactly fit in there either. Her friends and family have all carried on with their lives without her, and Marji finds herself adrift in purposelessness and sinking into depression. There’s a seemingly impenetrable gulf between Marji and the people who surround her. They have been through a war, she has spent several years isolated from everything familiar to her in a Western, Christian country, and no matter how hard they try, they’re unable to truly understand each other’s experiences. Strangers are born from friends and loved ones.
Persepolis tells a fascinating story about a girl who is torn through war and revolution and exile from the world that she knows, and how she rebuilds a life for herself through sheer force of will. The use of animation allows themes to be explored abstractly, and pieces of her life consolidated in a way that makes the narrative incredibly compelling. It sets a standard for what not only animation but the entire medium of film can accomplish when it comes to exploring intensely intimate, real-life stories.