Cartoon recap of the comic-strip memoir by Marjane Satrapi, covering her childhood in Iran under (and then out from under) the Shah, her adolescence in Austria to escape the strictures of the Islamic Revolution, her return to her homeland as a depressed and medicated young woman, then a bride, then a divorcee, and her ultimate exile in France, stretching from the late Seventies, to put dates on it, to the early Nineties. The animation is not all that animated. With stiff movement, a flat visual field, and a black-and-white palette (but for the lightly colored framing scenes in the present tense), it is the furthest thing from the limitless taffy-pull of contemporary computer animation. It is in fact quite deliberately reactionary, a return to “nature” if you will, a homespun product of the human hand, staying as close as possible (notwithstanding some decorative embellishment here and there) to the naive style of the original drawings. And since Satrapi herself is credited as co-director along with a fellow comic artist, Vincent Paronnaud, we can be sure the result has her stamp of approval. The general effect, overriding any risk of trivialization, is something in the vicinity of the Brechtian “alienation effect,” something distancing, something cushioning, so that we experience such painful subjects as political oppression, imprisonment, torture, execution, etc., less viscerally and (for all the outward resemblance to a Saturday-morning TV kiddie cartoon) more cerebrally. That’s not to say the film goes in for in-depth analysis of Middle Eastern modern history. It goes at these subjects strictly from the point of view of a growing girl trying to make sense of them, and the emphasis gradually and eventually shifts to the individual. If she started out to bear witness to the events of her time, she wound up in the long run a witness primarily to the witness. And she delivers her unblushingly personal testimony with candor, with humor, with self-deprecation, and with aesthetic distance — a distance commensurate to that provided by the primitive animation. Whatever mixed feelings we might have about that animation, they fall away as it becomes merely a serviceable vehicle, frugal and no frills, to convey the unhackneyed story. A useful medium, plain and simple. With the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Simon Abkarian, and Gabrielle Lopes. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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