Among the many talents of the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi is a skill for moving fluidly between forms and genres. A few years ago Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud co-directed a film version of her most famous book Persepolis, an autobiographical story about her childhood in Iran under the shadow of the Islamic Revolution and her eventual return as a young woman. I liked the film but I had one reservation: it was too often a straightforward cinematic presentation of the drawings Satrapi had already done for the book. Though there were a few well-chosen moments of added animation – such as an Expressionist scene where little Marjane’s features melt until she resembles the screamer in the famous Munch painting – the overall similarity to the source text made the viewing experience repetitive for a reader who was already very familiar with the book.
I was much happier with Satrapi’s decision to turn her book Chicken with Plums (original title Poulet aux Prunes) into a (mostly) live-action film. The movie, shown recently at Cinefan, is beautifully shot, cleverly structured and anchored by an extraordinary performance by French actor Mathieu Amalric as a depressed, middle-aged violinist named Nasser-Ali – based on a distant relative of Satrapi in 1950s Tehran – who decides to end his life. That doesn’t sound like an upbeat story, and indeed the film makes a point of confirming early on that Nasser-Ali does die: a shot of his funeral is followed by a series of flashbacks that take us through his final eight days, as well as flashbacks within flashbacks that recount various earlier episodes, including a tragic love affair that aided his artistic growth but also cast a black shadow over his personal life. (“The love you have lost,” says his music teacher, not channelling Rockstar, “will be in each note you play.”)
What is most notable though is the film’s consistently whimsical tone and its many quaint asides such as the “flash-forwards” to the future lives of Nasser-Ali’s children, or a scene where he is visited by Azrael, the talkative Angel of Death. Chicken with Plums is a demonstration of how a movie can begin on a farcical, even buffoonish, note but gradually reveal its secrets so that – without the viewer even realising it – a deeply moving portrait of an individual and his society emerges. And yet, the light-hearted tone is never forsaken. Certain characters – such as Nasser-Ali’s apparently sullen, shrewish wife – are presented unflatteringly at first, and only later shown in a more poignant light. There are jokes about death, as in the sequence where he mulls and rejects various suicide options (being discovered with a plastic bag over one’s head would not be very dignified, would it?).
This tenor sometimes tilts into over-the-top slapstick: one scene has vignettes from the crass American life destined for Nasser-Ali’s son Cyrus, who will marry his cheerleader girlfriend after he accidentally gets her pregnant, settle into hick domesticity and look goggle-eyed when he learns that his own (pea-brained but elephant-sized) daughter has a bun in the oven. This is broad caricature, but under it is the suggestion that Cyrus’s life may not have taken this turn if his father had been a happier, more fulfilled man. A personal tragedy involving two people echoes across time and space, affecting the lives of generations and spawning its own mini-histories.
This can be described as a bittersweet film, though I feel like that word is a little insubstantial (it has a patronising edge to it, as if saying “This isn’t really serious, but it’ll do until something deeper comes along”). Chicken with Plums allows a viewer to laugh at certain aspects of situations that are essentially tragic; at times it might even seem that we are laughing at Nasser-Ali himself. But the mirth is less specific, more inclusive than that – it recognises how the profound and the ridiculous constantly coexist in human lives. There is a running gag about Nasser-Ali being interrupted by an inappropriate sound whenever he is about to say something meaningful (and one hilarious scene imagines the philosopher Socrates’s last words being similarly interrupted) – these scenes are reminders of the many banana peels strewn on life's roads, waiting to make us look silly just as we are constructing grand narratives or making life-changing decisions. But that doesn’t make us pathetic, only human, and Satrapi's film is gently, wonderfully cognisant of this.
[Did a version of this for my Business Standard column. An old post on Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries is here]
The movie version of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis is playing in a couple of theatres in the city, including the PVR in Saket’s Select Mall and the pointlessly named PVR-Europa in Gurgaon. (I think Europa was originally meant to screen non-mainstream European films, but those plans were quickly discarded.) I saw the film last week and enjoyed it. It’s a joint adaptation of Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and its sequel Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return – the first book tells the autobiographical tale of a young Iranian girl growing up in the shadow of the 1979 Islamic revolution; the second is about Marjane’s stay in Austria, where her liberal parents sent her at the age of 14, her return four years later to her home country, and the difficulties she faced as a young woman dealing with repression and social hypocrisy.
The film is co-directed by Satrapi herself and voiced by the likes of Catherine Deneuve, Sean Penn and Gena Rowlands. (I saw the English version. In the original French version, incidentally, the role of Marjane’s grandmother was voiced by the veteran French actress Danielle Darrieux, who is well into her 90s now.) Satrapi has done a fine job of transferring her drawings and script to another medium, but a word of caution for viewers whose expectations may have been heightened by the advances in movie animation: Persepolis – in both its written and filmed avatars – is driven more by content than by form. In the books, Satrapi’s drawings are simple, black-and-white woodcuts that are mostly concerned with advancing the narrative. They also follow a conventional rectangular-panel arrangement, rather than the complex, multi-layered storyboarding that you’ll find in many modern graphic novels. The film has a similarly uncomplicated structure.
But this also means that the carefully selected occasions when Satrapi does experiment with style are all the more effective. The books pick their dramatic moments very well and I thought this translated to the movie, which has moments of inventiveness that are very forceful: for instance, a key scene from the first book, where young Marjane sees a disembodied foot in the rubble of a neighbour’s bombed house, has been given an Expressionist twist here, with Marjane’s features – her face frozen in a silent scream – melting until she resembles the screamer in Munch’s famous painting. This is followed by a very slow fade to black, perhaps indicating that the episode marks the end of innocence for this young girl, the beginning of a new chapter in her life.
There is also some interesting use of charcoal drawings (which weren’t in the books) for backgrounds. And certain elements of the story are more effective in movie form than they were on the page – such as the use of western pop songs like “Eye of the Tiger” as a pointer to Marjane’s rebellious nature, and the burlesque series of panels that depict the physical changes in Marjane (giving us a short-cut for her metamorphosis into a young woman).
Naturally, the 90-minute running time means that a few sub-plots have had to be sacrificed, but nothing of great significance has been cut out. A certain amount of simplification was inevitable. Perhaps keeping in mind her global viewership, Satrapi has made the cultural references more accessible in places: in one scene, after Marjane returns from Austria, a wide-eyed family member mentions The Sound of Music and the Von Trapp family, and asks her if she met Julie Andrews; in the book, the question involved the Austrian actress Romy Schneider.
The darkness of its subject matter and the relative simplicity of its animation necessarily means that Persepolis won’t be to all tastes. (I also think this film might have greater appeal for viewers who haven’t read the books. For those who have, it can get repetitive; a faithful animated movie version of a comic book can’t bring too much new to the table.) Also, Persepolis tends to drag a little towards the end – the story of Marjane’s unsuccessful marriage and the events that led to her leaving her country for a second time were never all that exciting in the book either.
But there’s nothing to fault in the first three-fourths of this film. Like its source material, this is a work of intelligence, sensitivity and humour, driven by a very likable protagonist. Before our eyes, Marjane moves from being a confused girl to a headstrong young woman – occasionally too impetuous for her own good, but always learning from her experiences, and willing to see the lighter side of a life lived in painfully exciting times.
[A version of this appears in Tehelka this week. An earlier post on Satrapi’s Embroideries here]
"To speak behind others’ backs is the ventilator of the heart" says a grandmother knowingly, and with those words a group of Iranian ladies settle down for a post-prandial session of tea and gossip in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novella Embroideries. In the cinematic style so beloved of this medium, a short prologue is followed by the "credits", in the form of an aerial view of the book’s title embroidered across a table cloth. It’s a homely picture - but "embroideries" has more than one meaning, as we will soon see.
The women narrate their stories, or the stories of other people they know. One woman has given birth to four children but still has no inkling of what the male organ looks like; another was, as a 13-year-old, made up to look "like a little whore" in preparation for her wedding with a 69-year-old man; another seemingly picture-perfect marriage ends with the man stealing the woman’s jewellery and vanishing (though she’s equally concerned about her "lost honour"); a woman thrilled about having married her daughter off to a multi-millionnaire discovers he is homosexual. Virginity, and the need to "preserve" it for your husband - or, if that isn’t possible, to fake it - is the theme that runs through the book (and which eventually gives the title its far edgier double meaning).
Marjane Satrapi has been widely acclaimed for her autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis II: The Story of a Return, about growing up in Iran under the shadow of the Islamic revolution - and later, as a liberated young woman, dealing with repression and hypocrisy. Those were fully fleshed out creations: one got the sense of a story that had to be urgently told, of a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. Embroideries is a patchwork in comparison - a smaller, more modest book. The story doesn’t cover as wide a canvas (though to be fair it wasn’t intended to - cosiness and intimacy are the bywords here, and by all accounts Embroideries is something of a filler between the author’s bigger projects). Nor are Satrapi’s trademark woodcut illustrations as complex or innovative as in the earlier novels.
Satrapi herself is part of the story, along with her mother, grandmother and aunts, and this book is undoubtedly an amalgamation of many such women’s discussions she has been part of, or has heard about: it’s obvious that she has an insider’s view. But it’s also important to remember that she was part of a progressive family to begin with, and then spent her crucial adolescent years in a liberal setting (living in Austria between the ages of 14 and 18). Consequently, at times the narrative seems patronising, like an easy-to-digest primer on the Sex Lives of Upper Class Women in Islamic Countries, aimed at the western reader. Nonetheless, this is engrossing stuff while it lasts. The talking point of this book is likely to be its sexual frankness. Men, even the ones who consider themselves progressive, will find much to be squeamish about (it’s common knowledge that our tribe is very uncomfortable about how much women tell each other!) while women everywhere will find much here that they can relate to.
But speaking in the context of Islamic societies, one can’t believe the cosy framework of Satrapi’s novella contains the whole picture. There have to be more stories to be told. Personally I much preferred the two Persepolises, which managed to address many of the topics covered in Embroideries, but wove them into a larger, more satisfying narrative framework. If you aren’t familiar with Satrapi’s work, I suggest you devour the first two books and then try to get hold of this one at half-price.
Graphic Novels RULE! I’m only half-joking when I tell people that if I had my way I wouldn’t read anything else. Have just finished Persepolis 2:The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi; it’s the sequel to her Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, which I’d read only a couple of weeks ago. The first book is the story of Marjane’s childhood and adolescence as a young Iranian in the shadow of the 1979 revolution; the second deals with her stay in Austria, where her parents sent her at the age of 14, her return to her home country and difficulties in adjusting to a very different cultural milieu.
Persepolis has been influenced (as have so many modern graphic novels) by Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Maus. I don’t have much time for a detailed blog now so here’s a piece I wrote for the books section of my newspaper’s lifestyle magazine recently:
The Holocaust, in a comic book
Jai Arjun Singh
In 1992 something atypical happened in the literary award universe. The Pulitzer Prize committee gave a special citation to a novel that could roughly be classifed as a comic book -- a category not generally beloved of crusty high-lit juries. But then Maus was no ordinary comic. Art Spiegelman’s attempt to understand the life of his father Vladek, a concentration camp survivor, is a work of uncommon intelligence, perspicuity and depth. And it helped bring the underappreciated genre of the graphic novel into the mainstream.
To understand what Spiegelman was up against in terms of gaining acceptance for his work, one needs to understand the reactions provoked by Holocaust art in many quarters. Several critics, like George Steiner, believe that the only way to deal with the Holocaust is by not depicting it at all. "In the face of certain realities," said Steiner, "art becomes trivial and insignificant." This view is understandable to an extent -- the chillingly systematic extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany is a subject so sensitive, the fear that it might be trivialised is a natural one. Imagine, in this context, the horrified reactions to the idea of a comic book version!
But Spiegelman sidesteps the exclusivist approach and tries, instead, to present the events for the ordinary reader, who wants to at least attempt to understand. When Vladek explains how the "fat from burning bodies was scooped out and poured again so everyone could burn better", the next panel shows Art holding his head and saying "Jesus!" Steiner and others would have considered this a grossly inadequate reaction to an inestimable horror; but then, it’s exactly how most of us would react on being told the story.
The use of a "non-realistic" medium like the comic book creates the necessary buffer between the reader and the subject matter, as does Art’s chief creative device: he depicts the Jews (including himself and his father) as mice, the Nazis as cats and the Poles as pigs. And there’s method behind the innovation: Hitler refused to acknowledge the Jews as "humans", and a Nazi manifesto denounced Mickey Mouse as a "filth-covered vermin" -- which is pretty much how they regarded Jews as well.
Maus moves between two time periods. The present is sometime in the 1970s, which is when young Art, notepad and tape recorder in hand, visits his cantankerous old father -- now remarried, after the suicide of Art’s mother a few years earlier. Over the course of several meetings, we get Vladek’s story from his youth in the early 1930s, through the first signs of anti-Semiticism revealing its darkest shades, and finally to the horrors of Auschwitz.
Some passages are difficult if you’re seeking a straightforward morality tale. Spiegelman’s drawings might be simple (albeit deceptively so) but there’s nothing simplistic about his treatment of the story. In the panel depicting speculations on why Art’s mother killed herself, "Menopausal tension" shares space with "Hitler did it!" And Art unsparingly depicts his aged father showing the same contempt for a black American hitchhiker that the Nazis had for the Jews. (Vladek justifies his prejudice by saying "It’s not even to compare the ‘Shvartsers’ and the Jews!") Intolerance knows no barriers; it infests even those who have been on the receiving end of the worst of it.
"I just wanted to portray my father accurately," says a confused Art at one point in the book. One of the many remarkable things about Maus is how it manages simultaneously to be a moving record of the greatest tragedy of the last century, and a son’s very personal tribute to his father.
I was much happier with Satrapi’s decision to turn her book Chicken with Plums (original title Poulet aux Prunes) into a (mostly) live-action film. The movie, shown recently at Cinefan, is beautifully shot, cleverly structured and anchored by an extraordinary performance by French actor Mathieu Amalric as a depressed, middle-aged violinist named Nasser-Ali – based on a distant relative of Satrapi in 1950s Tehran – who decides to end his life. That doesn’t sound like an upbeat story, and indeed the film makes a point of confirming early on that Nasser-Ali does die: a shot of his funeral is followed by a series of flashbacks that take us through his final eight days, as well as flashbacks within flashbacks that recount various earlier episodes, including a tragic love affair that aided his artistic growth but also cast a black shadow over his personal life. (“The love you have lost,” says his music teacher, not channelling Rockstar, “will be in each note you play.”)
This can be described as a bittersweet film, though I feel like that word is a little insubstantial (it has a patronising edge to it, as if saying “This isn’t really serious, but it’ll do until something deeper comes along”). Chicken with Plums allows a viewer to laugh at certain aspects of situations that are essentially tragic; at times it might even seem that we are laughing at Nasser-Ali himself. But the mirth is less specific, more inclusive than that – it recognises how the profound and the ridiculous constantly coexist in human lives. There is a running gag about Nasser-Ali being interrupted by an inappropriate sound whenever he is about to say something meaningful (and one hilarious scene imagines the philosopher Socrates’s last words being similarly interrupted) – these scenes are reminders of the many banana peels strewn on life's roads, waiting to make us look silly just as we are constructing grand narratives or making life-changing decisions. But that doesn’t make us pathetic, only human, and Satrapi's film is gently, wonderfully cognisant of this.
