Persepolis by Paul Bullock

For many, comic books will always be the realm of masked avengers, damsels in distress and hooded villains, but the medium is more diverse than the mainstream often accounts for. Since the mid-70s, sequential story-telling has also been home to more grounded and serious works, beginning with Will Eisner‘s seminal Contract With God series. The likes of Craig Thompson (Blankets) Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) and Art Spiegleman (Maus, In The Shadow Of No Towers) followed, and they were joined in 2003 by Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi, whose black-and-white graphic novel Persepolis has now made a successful transition to the big-screen in this stunning and deservedly-praised animation.

Telling the story of her youth in 1980s Tehran, Satrapi picks up where the likes of Eisner and Spiegleman left off. Like those writers' works, Persepolis has a decidedly political edge to it, taking in the failed revolutions, bloody dictatorships and violent wars that provided the backdrop to Satrapi’s troubled childhood. However, she and co-director Vincent Parounnaud have wisely steered clear of tackling these issues head-on. The politics is mentioned only in passing, with simple shadow puppet shows visualising précised historical exposition, while the damning role the West played in the turmoil and obvious links to today’s conflicts are touched upon but rarely developed explicitly.

Instead, Satrapi and Parounnaud put their manifesto across by filtering the political through the personal. Above all else, Persepolis is a coming-of-age tale, one which has echoes of J.G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, and the focus rarely shifts from Marjane. This proves a neat storytelling device which allows us to experience the bland teenage acts that we can all relate to but often take for granted through the eyes of the oppressed. Strict laws over the wearing of headdresses hinder Satrapi’s ability to be sexually free, Western popular culture is barred so she has to risk her life buying ABBA and Iron Maiden CDs from illegal street sellers and a house party she goes to is broken up by state police, resulting in a young man falling to his death while trying to escape them.

The difficulties of her life are further hit home to the audience by the decision to translate the comic’s visuals from page to screen almost verbatim, and to do so with animation. Satrapi’s style is very simple, bold and black and white, and this makes the violence and devastation seem even more visceral (although notably it manages to avoid being gratuitous). But its effect has a more important and subtle resonance. While the film certainly hasn’t lost its identity, it can’t be immediately distinguished as Iranian, as it would have been had sets been built and actors cast for a live-action movie. This helps lend Persepolis a sense of universalism. It makes the themes more palpable for those who have not experienced them and, significantly, portrays the characters not as Iranians to be pitied, but human beings to be related to.

This is needed to help the film make its most political point. Persepolis is bookended by scenes in modern-day France, where the adult Satrapi now lives. However, far from joyously revelling in her new-found freedom, these scenes find Satrapi feeling low. Her journey from naïve young Iranian to jaded immigrant has seen her lose her family, her home and, most importantly, her identity. This should speak to British audiences in particular. In an age where the issue of immigration is used as political levy, Persepolis in these final scenes becomes a powerful reminder of the human concerns behind the buzzwords. By allowing us to relate directly to the character and see her still desperate despite being free, it tells us that immigration must be seen from the immigrant’s point of view as well as our own, and that leaving your homeland isn‘t really a choice for many. So much for comic books only being the realm of the fantastical.