Friday, April 10, 2015

Feature Film Review: Persepolis



There are many ways to tell stories, and there are also plenty of ways and opportunities to refine the quality of a fictional tale. Refinement is a pesky and risky matter in non-fiction storytelling because you cannot take much liberties with your life story without being disingenuous, criticized and "found out" for doing so. Marjane Satrapi published her life story in comic form as Persepolis. I read the whole thing and really enjoyed the first half but due to the nature of her story, I found the second half disappointing and not as entertaining or enlightening. Since I found some of it unsatisfactory and since the story was already "solidified" as a book, I didn't think there would be much difference or changes made to the story's movie adaptation (co-directed by Mrs. Satrapi). I then read a comment on iMDb by a woman saying that the movie was worse than the graphic novel (in their opinion) and I fear I took that with too many grains of salt... by the time I watched the movie I feared and expected the same problems to plague the film which gave me hesitation to watch it. My expectations were proven wrong, however.