Reviewed by Tim D. Sherer

In one of the Beverley Hills Cop movies, Eddie Murphy drives up to an information kiosk that gives him options for English and Spanish -- and choose 4 for Farsi. He laughs, because - you know - those wacky Californians, putting everything into different wacky languages, being all multi-cultural and Kumbaya. That's hilarious.

Farsi is a language spoken in Iran. You find it in Los Angeles because after the new regime took over in Iran in 1979, some people were no longer welcome in Iran. People who were too western, people who were too close to the United States. Many of them settled in the Los Angeles area. They worked as maids and drove taxis so Eddie Murphy could have a cheap joke at their expense.

"Persepolis" is the story of a woman who was 10 or so in 1979. It is her memoir of growing up in a political family in the 1970s and 1980s, when Iran went through a revolution, a war, and increasing religious repression. The movie's narrator finally moved to Paris after the Iran that she and her parents knew and loved was gone forever.

The story isn't all political, but politics is never far from the surface. Marjane 'Marji' Statrapi is growing up in a fast-changing nation. Her family has ties to radical political movements. Her uncle is a communist, trained in the old USSR. Her family is thrilled when the Shah falls. They view him as nothing but a British puppet. They imagine a reformed, modern Iran.

Soon after the Islamic Republic settles in for history, they find their hopes blunted. Marji gets to visit her uncle in jail just before he is executed. Marji gets in trouble at school for speaking against Islamic orthodoxy. Her parents send her out of the country for school to keep her safe. They can't go themselves. That's where the line about working as a maid and driving a taxi comes from. 

And this is where the story turns apolitical. In Europe, with Marji's young friends, the revolution and war with Iraq are just other cool experiences, something exotic. In Austria, being shuffled from one living situation to another, Marji does all the teenage things - partying, literature, boys, smoking, boys, politics, boys - and finally ends up sleeping on the streets, just this || far from dying of exposure. 

She comes back to Iran and faces culture shock. She finds an Iran where police harass people on morals charges. Secret parties are the rebellion against the orthodoxy. Marji gets some freedom as a student and tries to make a life of it with a marriage and her career as an artist. 

Persepolis is animated, mostly in black and white. It shifts in tone from fanciful and whimsical to narrowly realistic. Animation pays off here in a way live action wouldn't.

When she is a child, we see Marji's parent's description of the history of Iran as exaggerated story-book images. They tell her the story to a ten year old's level and we see it as such.

Sometimes what we are seeing is what Marji is feeling. Her boyfriend changes from handsome to gruesome the moment he cheats on her. He changes on screen as he changes in Marji's mind and memory. 

But this is also a story about harsh realities. In one scene, where young men are fleeing the police by jumping from rooftop to rooftop, one of them misses and falls to his death. In a movie where Marji earlier talks to a child's vision of God up in the clouds, you still have believe in gravity.

Between the political and the personal, Marji grows up, discovers boys, lives in a foreign country where she is not all that welcome, has bouts with depression, and has to choose whether to fit in to an Iran that was not what she or her parents wanted. 

It's not easy to come and go to Iran. When she was choosing whether to leave, she knew she would never see her grandmother again. She must have imagined she would rarely, if ever, see her parents again. She said she'd miss the mountains you can see from Tehran. According to Wikipedia, Persepolis is the ancient capital of Persia. That is what Marji felt she was leaving behind.

This movie has a lot to offer. It's a shame that they couldn't have dubbed it into English so it would have wider appeal. I don't think it would degrade the artistic expression of the film makers to release a version of their movie that people would actually see. This movie is about the people Eddie Murphy joked about. This movie is about the people John McCain wants to bomb.