Adapted from her acclaimed graphic novel, Marjane Satrapi’s memoirs are far from black and white. By JOE SHEPPARD.

Persepolis won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year and it was well worth the wait to see such an accomplished, accessible and utterly unique film at the Paramount in Wellington. Equal parts social history and Bildungsroman, the animated Persepolis was adapted from an autobiographical graphic novel by the Iranian French author Marjane Satrapi. The story goes that Alexander of Macedon went on a legendary bender in the Persian capital Persepolis, awakening the next morning to find smouldering ashes where the city used to be. Some six hundred miles north in modern Tehran, East again clashes with West as the rebellious and independent young Satrapi struggles to find her identity amid the turbulence of the Islamic revolution and the totalitarian theocracy of the ensuing years. Sent to Vienna for a liberal education, Satrapi had to grow up adapting to life in two vastly different cultures. The resulting film is an appropriate farrago of different ideologies and languages, genres, episodes and styles that cohere into a fascinating and moving impression of a chaotic upbringing.

Satrapi has collaborated with writer/director Vincent Paronnaud to yank the quirky characters and vignettes from her comics into full and expressive life. The rich imagination of the teenaged protagonist provides a lot of laughs throughout, but her wise, straight-shooting grandmother steals the show with a strong set of values and a bawdy sense of humour. The tight strength of the core family is constantly buffeted amid a sea of entertaining minor characters, from the Marxist scholar and political prisoner Uncle Anoush to the pretentious and unrealistic Austrian punks she befriends at school.

By using sparse bursts of colour to render the enormous contrast between 1980s Vienna and Tehran, Satrapi and Paronnaud are able to play with the long traditions of both indie comics and black-and-white cinema. Rather than merely duplicating the thick lines and dark panels of Satrapi’s art, the directors have made full use of cinematic techniques to capture the tenor and essence of Satrapi’s story as faithfully as the static page had ever originally communicated it. The soundtrack for example charts the adolescent Satrapi’s developing taste in music, while the richly textured backgrounds segue effortlessly between flashbacks, fantasy and reality. History is engagingly summarised as a farce: a Punch-and-Judy pantomime of puppets and players.

In an age where it’s become de rigueur for the two big US publishers to butcher their most bankable superheroes routinely on the big screen, it’s a pleasure to see that the other major comicbook traditions – the French and Japanese – still know how to treat their most precious cultural assets. (As if Tintin didn’t have big enough shoes to fill already!) Persepolis was an inspired choice for the programme launch of the New Zealand International Film Festivals: at its heart a story so simple and familiar to any audience that it’s easy to forget all about its formal innovation or ambitious scope and just have a blast.