Well, here it is: as a cartoonist myself, I was interested chiefly because of style, and Persepolis has tons of style. Unfortunately, it does not have tons of content. In preparation for the film, which shot in and out of theaters too fast for me to catch it, I read the 2-volume graphic novel on which the film is based. What basically happened was, all the great, enthralling, life-altering stuff that happens in volume one fails to make the character grow at all in volume two, when she's "coming of age" (I really hate that phrase). She lives through war and poverty and revolutions gone wrong, and all she learns how to do is date silly men, act inconsistently toward friends, and throw secret parties to thwart the Iranian government. So it's sort of a let-down. Mind you, the film and the book are subtly different, but the book is the better, more complete story, so I refer to it primarily, to give the best face to the story as a whole. The film, however, ends with a bizarre choice of reference to an earlier conversation which has no business being the last lines of the film, and seems to have been tacked on just to place a chord at the end of a song with no ending. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the film seems to quit on itself. The author quits on God, country, and nearly everyone else during her life, so I guess quitting is the theme.
Review of Persepolis
