THE TRUISM THAT TEENAGERS ALWAYS THINK THEY’RE SANE BUT THE WORLD AROUND THEM IS MAD COMES TO VIVID LIFE IN THE SEEMINGLY UNLIKELY SETTING OF PRE-REVOLUTIONARY TEHRAN, AS MARJANE SATRAPI ADAPTS HER STRIKING GRAPHIC NOVELS INTO THIS SPLENDID ANIMATED FEATURE.
The visual style may be in a starkly effective black-and-white, but nothing else in young Marjane’s experience is quite so cut-and-dried. Coming from a family of intellectual suburbanites with a history of political dissent against the corrupt Shah, she sees herself as a bit of a rebel too, with her western sneakers, Bruce Lee posters and Iron Maiden cassettes, but has to adjust her perspective with the rest of her household when the country elects a new Islamic regime and the Iran-Iraq war unleashes terrifying aerial bombardment on the city. Suffocating under the veil, Marjane can’t take it anymore, but is a move to faraway Vienna really the answer to her feelings that she doesn’t belong? What’s particularly refreshing about Satrapi and her co-director Vincent Paronnaud’s handling of all this is that at no time does the film feel like it’s aiming for a grand statement about religion versus secularism or East versus West, since Marjane’s always her own woman, shaped by the world as she finds it. So often it’s the little things that mean a lot—a bread swan her uncle carves for her in prison, the way her granny smells of jasmine—and the rocky road to understanding certainly takes her down a few wrong turnings. Warm, witty and entirely mischievous in the telling, this is one of the great coming-of age movies.—Trevor Johnston.