Persepolis

source: cesma

Persepolis é um filme francês de animação de 2007, baseado no romance gráfico autobiográfico homônimo de Marjane Satrapi. O filme foi escrito e dirigido por Satrapi e Vincent Paronnaud. Sua trama começa pouco antes da Revolução Iraniana, quando Marjane atinge a adolescência, e acaba quando ela é uma expatriada de 22 anos. O título é uma referência à cidade histórica de Persépolis.

O filme estreou no Festival de Cannes de 2007, onde recebeu o prêmio do júri.

Persepolis,2007

Direção: Marjane Satrapi e Vincent Paronnaud.

Animação, Drama: 95 minutos

Sinopse: Marjane Satrapi (Gabrielle Lopes) é uma garota iraniana de 8 anos, que sonha em se tornar uma profetisa para poder salvar o mundo. Querida pelos pais e adorada pela avó, Marjane acompanha os acontecimentos que levam à queda do xá em seu país, juntamente com seu regime brutal. Tem início a nova República Islâmica, que controla como as pessoas devem se vestir e agir. Isto faz com que Marjane seja obrigada a usar véu, o que a incentiva a se tornar uma revolucionária.
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source: theguardian

Here is an adaptation so inspired, so simple and so frictionless in its transformation of the source material that it’s almost a miracle. When I tell people it’s a lo-fi animation, largely in black-and-white, about Iran, they put their heads in their hands and make a low groaning sound. But I’ve seen those same people bounce happily out of the cinema after seeing it as if they had had some sort of caffeine injection.

Superbly elegant and simple, it is based on the comic-book series by the Franco-Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi, a coming-of-age story that I can only describe as an auto-graphic-novel-ography. Satrapi has co-written and co-directed the movie version, and what a treat: funny and moving with a bracingly authentic feel, reproducing the graphic work with broad, bold strokes and a depth-of-field effect achieved with a recessive series of two-dimensional planes, like the ocean waves at the back of a panto set. Muted colour tones are introduced for sequences happening in the present, and deploying the cartoonist’s classic skill, Satrapi creates witty and sympathetic facial expressions with hardly more than a squiggle. This is one of those rare things in the cinema: a movie with an urgent new story to tell and an urgent new way of telling it.

It is the story of Marjane, a little girl growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran in the 1970s. Her hero is Bruce Lee, and she is always scampering under the grown-ups’ legs at parties, baffling one and all by striking ferocious martial arts poses. She is the indulged and adored daughter of well-to-do secular leftists who campaign ceaselessly against the Shah, and find family members harassed and imprisoned. When the revolution arrives, Marjane’s parents and their cigarette-smoking, alcohol-drinking, idea-discussing and life-enjoying friends at first welcome it. The fanatical theocrats make them nervous, but they are confident that all this is just a phase on the road to progressive enlightenment. But they find that the Islamic state is here to stay. And there is one group it hates most of all: women.

Marjane herself, particularly as a little girl, is a superb character, smart, vulnerable, with a cheerful, non-PC love of western trash culture. She has something of Lisa Simpson and a little more of Peanuts’ Lucy van Pelt, but with a seriousness and a single-mindedness that is all her own. She is close to her mother, closer still to her wise and worldly grandmother, whose wit and shrewdness she imbibes. Hers is a funny and deeply involving story but its sharp stabs against the women-hatred of the Iranian governing classes are enough to trigger rage.

The streets are patrolled by a swaggering cadre of morality police. One barks at Marjane’s hard-working and modest mother, as she is getting her daughter into the car: “Fix your scarf, sister!” – that is, pull it even more tightly and meekly around your head. When her mother mildly protests, he screams in her face: “I fuck whores like you and throw them in the trash.” It is a shocking moment, and has every sign of being based on the exact truth. The movie’s most agonising moment comes when Marjane confesses to her grandmother a shaming episode of collaboration with the oppressor. Fearing that she would be pulled up by these morality street cops for wearing lipstick and makeup, she pre-emptively diverts them by claiming that a man was ogling her – an entirely innocent bystander who was then dragged off for questioning. This shaming, absurd, petty episode makes the Iranian state look like a Soviet tyranny.

As she grows into her teens and 20s, Marjane is sent abroad for a chaotic education in Europe, where she experiences the finest condescension and misogyny that the west has to offer: in fact, something of the exploitation inherent in sexual-liberalism that the mullahs warned her about, while not scrupling themselves to enforce a far harsher subjection. In spite of herself, Marjane finds a gravitational pull to a homeland that rejects free-thinking women: a complicated, bittersweet sense of exile which Satrapi has cultivated in her graphic novels and in this richly seductive and entertaining movie.

Persepolis gives us the sheer pleasure of narrative, rarely found in modern cinema or indeed fiction: a gripping story of what it is like to grow from a lonely imaginative child into an adult, and to find this internal tumult matched by geo-political upheaval.

My only disappointment with the UK release is that it is being shown here in the English-dubbed version. Chiara Mastroianni voices Marjane and Catherine Deneuve the mother, speaking in heavily accented English. But Danielle Darrieux’s original voice performance as the grandmother has been replaced by Gena Rowlands – perfectly good, though this version in general loses some of the flavour of the French original. My only other tiny worry is that the presence of an American producer – veteran Spielberg associate Kathleen Kennedy – might get the movie suspected in some quarters of anti-Iranian propaganda. But Persepolis is too complex for that, too entertaining, and too robustly alive.

· The following clarification was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday April 30 2008. Our review of the film Persepolis, set in Iran, suggested that only an English-dubbed version would be shown in the UK. In fact cinemas have been offered the choice of screening a dubbed or a subtitled version.
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source: movieplayerit

E’ qualcosa di più di una semplice commedia surreale, Pollo alle prugne, più di un divertissement fantasioso e coloratissimo che strizza l’occhio a esempi di cinema francese come il mai dimenticato Il favoloso mondo di Amelie. Il film di Marjane Satrapi e Vincent Paronnaud, tratto da una graphic novel della stessa Satrapi, è una favola amara e malinconica che si prende il suo tempo per rivelare allo spettatore la sua vera natura; il film segue intelligentemente la trasformazione, agli occhi dello spettatore, del suo protagonista, uno straordinario Mathieu Amalric; rivelandosi gradualmente come un’opera impregnata di una profonda tristezza, persino nichilista nelle sue implicazioni, ma capace nel raro intento di commuovere e scaldare il cuore nonostante l’apparente assenza di speranza che la caratterizza, la sostanziale resa del suo protagonista a un destino cinico e beffardo al quale non c’è modo di opporsi.
Proprio di questo film, che segna il passaggio al cinema live action dei due registi dopo il precedente (e apprezzatissimo) Persepolis, abbiamo parlato con gli stessi Satrapi e Paronnaud, in una conversazione stimolante e ricca di spunti di riflessione.
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source: cavesdumajesticcanalblog
Ab sofort erhältlich ist eine Neuauflage von Marjane Satrapis Graphic Novel-Klassiker “Persepolis”. Ursprünglich in zwei Teilen erschienen, ist dies die erste Gesamtausgabe in der Edition Moderne.

Aus der Perspektive eines kleinen Mädchens erzählt die gebürtige Iranerin Marjane Satrapi von der islamischen Revolution von 1979 und vom Krieg mit dem Irak – und zwar in einer einfachen, aber effektiven Bildsprache. Um dem iranisch-irakischen Krieg zu entkommen, wird sie als Jugendliche von ihren Eltern aus Teheran nach Wien geschickt. Nach vier Jahren kehrt sie trotz der Faszination der europäischen Jugendkultur wegen Heimweh nach Teheran zurück, wo sie als dekadent gilt und mit den täglichen Widerwärtigkeiten des islamischen Regimes konfrontiert wird. Von nun an ist sie nirgendwo mehr zuhause.