Persepolis review

Exiled Iranian comic author and illustrator Marjane Satrapi had already had what the French call un succes fou - a mad success - with her four volume graphic novel series Persepolis, but the six million euro big screen adaptation of her work has exceeded all expectations, scooping a clutch of awards including the Jury Prize at Cannes last year and being nominated for the Best Animated Feature at this year's Oscars.

Persepolis is the personal tale of Satrapi's upbringing in Iran from the 70s to the 90s, before she left for a permanent Gallic residence. While it is strong on portraying the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollah and the subsequent pointless war against Saddam's Iraq, it does fail to answer a few questions that could have elevated it into greatness.

Shot in a vivid black and white hand-drawn style, the film opens with depictions of a swinging Iran in the 1970s, with the young Satrapi and her family attending an alcohol-fuelled party. Clearly the Shah may have been dictatorial but he didn't mind his people having a good time. This opening scene seems de rigueur in the current wave of films about repression, with both The Lives of Others and The Kite Runner beginning with similar depictions of parties in East Germany and Afghanistan respectively.

The age old question of what do you do once you have achieved your revolution is also neatly portrayed: in Iran's case suppress the population and begin a bloody conflict. There are some amusingly quirky details despite the grimness of the 80s: it's interesting to see the teenage Satrapi buying bootleg Iron Maiden cassettes, a band whose iconic war-fuelled imagery has clearly influenced her own style.

Trickier though are the scenes surrounding Satrapi's family: they are able to afford to send her to a private lycee in Tehran, ship her off to Vienna for a prolonged period and subsequently fund her stay in France through obtaining a speedy visa. It's never satisfactorily explained to which echelon of society they belong, but it's clearly not that of the common man.

It's also fair to say that Satrapi's feisty character may irritate some audience members, and the lengthy sequences of youthful rebellion in Austria add little. Despite its flashback structure - the final scenes in Iran are dated about 1996, so it can hardly be described a valid depiction of life in the country today - it never reaches a satisfactory conclusion.

Oddly, and for the first time I can remember, the film is being released in both a subtitled and dubbed version, with the likes of Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni in the French language version and Sean Penn and Iggy Pop in the dubbed one. At the screening I attended critics were given a choice of which one to see and I was more than surprised to see the majority of them plumping for the dubbed version.

Paul Hurley