The Picture Show: Persepolis (2007)

Contrary to popular belief, the comic book is more than just a vehicle for tales of men in spandex. To understand this, one need look no further than Marjane Satrapi’s wonderful Persepolis. Far from an action tale of flights and tights, Persepolis is an autobiographical work, telling the story of Satrapi’s experiences growing up in Iran at the time of Islamic Revolution; of her coming of age in Austria; and of her return to Iran as a young adult, older but not entirely wiser. Persepolis was deservedly acclaimed upon its initial release, and as one might expect, the movies came calling; a French language animated film was produced in 2007. Unlike many adaptations, however, the movie version of Persepolis was virtually guaranteed to hew closely to the book, for one simple reason: Satrapi herself was directing. The film, co-directed by Vincent Paronnaud, was (with a few notable exceptions) a very close adaptation of its source material – yet in spite of this, it cannot be considered a mere “filming” of the original comic frames. Far from it; Satrapi and Paronnaud’s Persepolis involves many of the same situations, themes and characters as the graphic novel, but translates them into a new medium – the medium of cinema.

In terms of faithfulness, Persepolis the film immediately has an advantage over most comic adaptations in that it is animated. As a result, while most live action comic book films are faced with the realization that their characters cannot exactly resemble the source material, the film version of Persepolis is able to more or less faithfully preserve Satrapi’s drawing style. It’s a style which might initially seem simplistic to eyes accustomed to the more challenging comic book art of, say, a David Lloyd or a Dave Gibbons. Indeed, “simplicity” is a good word for describing Satrapi’s art. All of the characters in Persepolis are depicted as simple configurations of line and shape. Satrapi gives each of her main characters a few basic, defining characteristics: Marjane’s Uncle Anoosh has wavy hair and mustache; her father Ebi has a thick black mustache; her grandmother has a thick head of white hair and wrinkles around her eyes; and the adult Marjane is given a small beauty mark. The backgrounds follow much the same style; they are simple, even sparse, unencumbered by extraneous details.

The simplicity of Satrapi’s art should not, however, be construed as simplistic. In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud argues that all lines inherently convey meaning; for example, a vertical line looks proud and defiant, while a diagonal line appears energized. In McCloud’s view, any line may become open to interpretation. What are we to make, then, of Satrapi’s art? The visual style of Persepolis is simple, yes, but purposefully; both works seek to convey a very specific world of emotion.

I don’t think I can stress this enough, because it’s one of the criticisms that has been most vehemently leveled at Satrapi – that her work does not represent the “real” Iran, or the Iranian people. Persepolis never makes any claims to being an objective tale; this is Marjane’s story, Marjane’s reminiscences. Everything is seen through her eyes; events that Marjane clearly did not witness are filtered through her child’s/young adult’s imagination. When the authorities chase some boys across the rooftops, and one boy falls to his death, the event is depicted in an abstract form, almost entirely in silhouettes; the reader/viewer is aware that what they are seeing is not so much what happened as reality filtered through Marjane’s reminiscences. Look also at young Marjane’s depiction of a scene of Iranian citizens being slaughtered inside a burning theater, or the execution of the Mujahideen, as told to Marjane by her father; the emphasis is on the emotional effect that these stories have on young Marjane, not on the physical reality of what actually happened. Persepolis functions in the same way that memory does; while the mundane details may fade, the emotions of given moments create vivid and lasting impressions.

All of this is ably portrayed by Satrapi’s art. The idea is to not distract the reader/viewer with visual pyrotechnics and grand aesthetic; this is the life of Marjane Satrapi, and while it is remarkable in some respects, in others it is quite mundane. Persepolis is very much a story about everyday life; about the silly games children play, about how they try discuss the topics they’ve hear their parents converse on, about childhood and puberty and first love and heartbreak. Satrapi conveys this story simply and sparsely, free of visual “kerfuffle”. The art, like the prose, is focused and disciplined; it means to convey nothing more than the essential emotion of the story.

Similar qualities can be ascribed to Satrapi’s use of color – or, more appropriately, the lack of it. The great director Orson Welles once told film critic Peter Bogdanovich that black and white was “the actor’s friend…every performance is better in black and white.” Bogdanovich felt that this was attributable to “the lack of distraction; you don’t sit there saying, ‘Aren’t those blue eyes beautiful’…It focuses on the dramatic.” A similar analogy could be applied to the art of Persepolis. The comic is done entirely in black and white; there are literally no shades of gray in Satrapi’s visual world. By doing this, Satrapi is able to focus more intensely on the humor, pathos and emotion of the tale; we are not distracted by vibrant colors and artistic flourishes. The film version follows much the same tactic. Aside from a few present day scenes in very simple, muted shades of color, Persepolis is a black and white film. (Curiously enough, the black and white sections of the film tend to feel more “real” and involving than do the color scenes; the black and white acts almost as a Rorschach inkblot, allowing the audience to more readily jump into the story.)

Unsurprisingly for a film co-directed by the author of the book, the experience of viewing Persepolis is very similar to the experience of reading it. Satrapi and Paronnaud haven’t altered the book, but rather condensed it; in most cases, the story has been “streamlined”, with certain events cut to simplify matters. The visit of Marjane’s mother to Austria is cut; it’s just simpler if Marjane goes to Austria alone, and her parents stay in Iran. The long passage of the book detailing Marjane’s life in Austria has been pared down to the bare essentials; Marjane’s experiences with a sexually active friend, her encounters with a group of quasi-anarchist hippies, her rooming with a group of gay men – these are lengthy sequences in the book, but are alluded to quickly and concisely in one short montage in the film. It’s a way of compressing large expanses time and events into a manageable 90 minute package.

The greatest differences between the comic book and the film involve Marjane’s relationships with two men, Markus and Reza – the film simplifies both men from reasonably nuanced characters into reasonably stiff caricatures. In both the book and the film, Marjane meets Markus while in Austria; he’s a fetching, handsome lad, and he sweeps her off her feet. Markus, however, is not quite as perfect as he at first seems. He makes Marjane buy drugs while he wait in the car; he makes Marjane pay for gas on their first date; he fails to stand up to his mother when she calls Marjane a “witch”. The relationship finally ends when Marjane discovers Markus in bed with another woman; she recounts the scene as being “like a bad American movie, one of those films where the surprised man wraps himself in a sheet out of modesty and says, ‘Wait, I can explain everything!’”

All this occurs in both versions of the story, but in the book, the relationship is a bit more complex. The film’s Marjane realizes Markus’ flaws only after she catches him cheating; in the book, Marjane expresses her doubts much earlier, noting Markus’ failings but choosing to overlook them. The book’s Markus does fail to stand up to his mother, but Marjane is able to recognize that, “Markus must have been suffering more than I. He had to sacrifice his relationship with his mother to continue to see me.” In the film, Markus’ cowardice is not given any shading – in fact, it is only seen in flashback, without much context. In the end, the film’s version of the relationship with Markus consists of one idyllic montage, climaxing with the revelation of infidelity; Markus is not so much a character as he is an archetype – the cheating man.

Similar changes are made to the relationship between Marjane and Reza, the man whom she meets in Iran, marries and eventually divorces. The relationship between Marjane and Reza takes up a lot of pages in the book; we are given a detailed account of how they met and fell in love, and how the relationship finally broke down. The movie zips through all of this rather quickly, and as such the movie’s Reza comes across as a kind of cliff notes version of the original character. In the novel, we see both the inception and the decline of the relationship; Reza and Marjane are miles apart in temperament and outlook, and ultimately are simply unable to communicate. In the book, the two characters are at least able to sit down and have a mature conversation about the failure of their relationship; it’s sad, but it’s also fair to both characters, as they come to terms with the mistakes they have made.

Unfortunately, most of this material is breezed through in the film version; Reza is little more than a stick figure, and we mostly see him through the lens of Marjane’s unhappiness with the marriage. Their breakup is not dwelled upon; rather than a conversation, Marjane simply tells Reza, “I’m leaving you”, without little or no context as to what the problems of the marriage were. The details as to why the relationship initially sparked – and why it eventually failed – are kept vague.

All of these changes are certainly understandable. Along with the basic constraints of time, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s story, and spending too much time with any given supporting character might distract from that. Undoubtedly, there were some concerns related to the story’s “feminist” nature; the book’s Marjane grows into a proudly independent woman, and no doubt the filmmakers wanted to be careful not to portray Satrapi as having been “defined” by any given romantic relationship. These are all valid justifications, but I at least cannot help feeling a small twinge of regret over the way that the film version of Persepolis simplifies Satrapi’s romantic life, stripping it of much resonance.

Beyond those differences, the film and print versions of Persepolis are remarkably similar. But unlike equally faithful comics adaptations like 300 or Sin City, which seem (to these eyes at least) like rote copy and paste jobs of the graphic novels, the film version of Persepolis seems very much to be its own animal, clearly indebted but not beholden to the source material. Why is this?

I suspect it is because the film, in the way that the medium allows for a combination of artistic elements, is able to intensify many aspects of the book and give them a new life from that which they possessed on the page. Both the film and the comic book of Persepolis convey the sensation of the veil of time passing in front of events; we get the feeling that the moments we glimpse are those which have emerged from the fog of history, vivid even if the rest of Marjane Satrapi’s childhood is not. The book jumps from key moment to key moment in Marjane’s life, with little regard to marking blocks of time or giving us a strong chronological foothold. The film extends this sensation through the use of a very specific cinematic device – the fade. Most of the scenes in Persepolis start with a fade in, and end with a fade out; the device acts like the turning of pages in a book, and serves to accent the story’s episodic feel, to highlight the fact that these are only some of the “key moments” in a life history.

The film is even more successful in its transfer of the comic figures into motion. The great power of animation is its ability to exaggerate and caricature; characters can move and contort and transform in ways that are realistically impossible, sometimes for comedic purposes, sometimes for dramatic. The “guardians of the revolution” who confront Marjane when she buys some punk rock CDs are certainly forbidding in the novel, but in the film, their necks curve like threatening snakes; the addition of movement only serves to make the characters even more effective, more viscerally threatening. The film is also able to make Marjane’s flights of fancy more vivid; when the reign of the Shah is depicted as a puppet show, or God floats out of the ether at a crucial moment, or Marjane “breaks character” to perform an incongruous and entertaining version of “Eye of the Tiger”, the film is doing what the graphic novel could not do – it is using the combination of image and sound and movement.

Both the film and print versions of Persepolis, thematically speaking, cover essentially the same ground. The film benefits from the intensity of its medium; it is able through a convincing use of imagery and sound to make its visions of the impossible seem possible, even convincing. The book, on the other hand, utilizes the advantages that the literary form offers – it can take its time with its story, stopping to focus on a given character or situation or subplot, and not worry about hurrying along to the next dramatic crisis, lest a restless cinema audience become bored. I like to see the two works as being complementary, rather than cancelling each other out; each utilizes the tools of its given medium to bring this story – sometimes wondrous, sometimes heartbreaking, and always true – to life.