It may be primarily drawn in bold, stylised monochrome and animated for less than the cost of Pixar’s annual gumball budget, but few films have ever seemed quite as alive as Persepolis.
Marjane Satrapi’s award-winning film of her million-selling graphic novel is a warm, hilarious, moving account of coming of age in revolutionary Iran. An aristocrat by blood – her maternal great-grandfather was Nasser-al-Din Shah, Persian emperor from 1848 to 1896 – Satrapi was raised with privilege in Tehran, where her father was an engineer, her mother a fashion designer. Surrounded by Westernised, Marxist intellectuals, she was a precocious child who grew up to be a rebellious adolescent.
The family campaigned against the Shah, and looked forward to the Islamic revolution until they found themselves under the fanatical rule of the Mullahs. Political oppression and such seismic events as the Iran-Iraq conflict are mediated through the experiences of the young lippy Marjane, who re-enacts prison tortures with her childhood chums and finds her best friend’s bracelet in the rubble attached to remnants of her hand.
Terrified that her penchant for mouthing off and rocking out to Iron Maiden will bring her to the attention of the Mullahs, her parents ship her off to Europe where Marjane imagines she’ll find secular freedom – “It’s going to be cool to go to school with a veil, to not have to beat oneself every day for the war martyrs.”
It doesn’t quite work out that way.
Ms. Satrapi, together with co-director Vincent Paronnaud, has worked her compelling autobiography into a near perfect film. The cast of characters are engaging and fondly recreated through acute personal details, and our heroine’s recollections are presented without dewy-eyed nostalgia or miserabilism.
Though now in her thirties, Ms. Satrapi retains the punk spirit that defined her teenage years. She may no longer jump up and down on her bed to Iggy but, in a way, this witty, brazen piece of cinema is doing just that.

[95mins. Cert 12A]
OPENS APRIL 25