PERSEPOLIS ★★★ WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY MARJANE SATRAPI AND VINCENT PARONNAUD
WITH THE VOICES OF CHIARA MASTROIANNI, CATHERINE DENEUVE, DANIELLE DARRIEUX, AND SIMON ABKARIAN
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Unfortunately Persepolis (whose Chicago release was pushed back to January 18 as this issue went to press) won’t get anything like the promotional blitz enjoyed by Ratatouille, which opened in nearly 4,000 theaters nationwide. After Persepolis premiered at Cannes in May, Satrapi told the International Herald Tribune that an English-dubbed version was in the works, and a subsequent story in the Hollywood Reporter listed Sean Penn, Gena Rowlands, and Satrapi’s hero Iggy Pop as voice talent for the alternate release. With its rebellious young heroine, universal coming-of-age story, and solid PG-13 rating, the movie might have won a following at every small-town multiplex in America, enlightening millions of kids raised on fear-mongering rhetoric about the Axis of Evil. But according to Jeff Marden, the film’s Chicago publicist, Sony Pictures Classics now has no plans to release an English-dubbed version, which almost guarantees that Persepolis will be confined to art houses in major cities. A subtitled version opened on Christmas Day in just seven theaters.
One person who can’t be too pleased about the nixed American version is Satrapi, who’s done everything she can to make her autobiographical tale accessible to as many people as possible. Though she’s a published writer in France, she decided to try a comic book (she’s said she finds the term “graphic novel” too pretentious) after being rocked by the visual power of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. “Image is an international language,” she told the Web site for Powell’s Books. “When you draw a situation—someone is scared or angry or happy—it means the same thing in all cultures.” From the start she framed the story for Western readers, writing in French rather than her native Farsi. The story’s greatest value lies in its elegant twining of the universal and the obscure: Satrapi’s funny and painful memories of childhood and adolescence will be familiar to most young women, but along with these come revelatory glimpses of her parents and their family, rebellious intellectuals who quietly tend the flame of liberal humanism in a Muslim theocracy.
