Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi masterfully adapts her graphic memoirs into a simply but expressively animated film about growing up in Iran under the last years of the Shah and the first years of the Islamic revolution. In adolescence she is exiled to Vienna by her protective, progressive parents, and after she returns to sample life under the mullahs, finally finds a new home in Paris. Boldly graphic in black & white, except for a few scenes in color at Orly Airport in Paris, from which the rest of the film flashes back, the hand-drawn animation is a marvel of economy and effect. The flat, stark, monochrome 2-D imagery achieves three dimensions and more, yielding all sorts of colors and tones. And the very specific story of one brash and passionate girl growing up achieves global and historical significance. We need to know about Iran more than ever, now that it is be positioned as our biggest enemy, and this film is eye-opening in more ways than one, as well as funny and moving. I found it worthwhile to watch both in an American-dubbed version, and in the original French, where the girl is voiced by Chiara Mastroianni and the mother by her real life mother, Catherine Deneuve, and the grandmother by the doyenne of Gallic film, Danielle Darrieux. (2007, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-90.)