27
May/11

GREAT ADAPTATIONS: PERSEPOLIS

27
May/11

Animated PERSEPOLIS is part of “Great Adaptations” series at Museum of the Moving Image

PERSEPOLIS (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud, 2007)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, May 28, and Sunday, May 29, free with museum admission of $10, 1:00
Series continues through July 3
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.sonypictures.com

France’s official selection for the 2007 Academy Awards, Persepolis brings to animated life Marjane Satrapi’s stunning graphic novels. Codirected by Satrapi and comic-book artist Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis tells Satrapi’s harrowing life story as she comes of age during the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Raised in a well-off activist family, she fights against many of the country’s crippling mores and laws, particularly those that treat women as second-class citizens, trapping them in their veils, denying them any kind of individual freedom. But the progressive Satrapi (voiced first by Gabrielle Lopes, then Chiara Mastroianni) continually gets into trouble as she speaks her mind, experiments with sex, and refuses to play by her country’s repressive rules. Satrapi and Paronnaud do an outstanding job of adapting the books’ black-and-white panels for the big screen, maintaining her unique style and emotional breadth. The first part of the film is excellent as the precocious teenager who talks to God learns about life in some very harsh ways. Unfortunately, the second half gets bogged down in Satrapi’s failures as an adult, focusing too much on her myriad personal problems and taking away the bigger picture that made the first part so entertaining as well as educational. Still, it’s a story worth telling, and well worth seeing. (Interestingly, since the film, which is in French, is subtitled in English, the audience ends up reading it similarly to the way they read the graphic novel.) The closing-night selection of the 2007 New York Film Festival, Persepolis also features the voices of Catherine Deneuve as Marjane’s mother, Danielle Darrieux as her grandmother, Simon Akbarian as her father, and François Jerosme as her radical uncle Anouche. Persepolis is screening May 28-29 at 1:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Great Adaptations” series, which continues June 4-5 with Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and June 11-12 with Alfonso Cuarón’s A Little Princess.