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PERSEPOLIS

My second recantation is over the wickedly seditious, animated feature, “Persepolis,” (Sony Pictures Classics) which not only won a jury prize at this year’s Cannes Festival, but was also the French nominee for this year’s foreign film Oscar as well as the Film Society’s selection as its prestigious closing night film. The Iranian Foreign ministry, that merely scorned ”Persepolis,” the popular French graphic novels of 2002, wrote a stern letter of protest to the French cultural authorities condemning the film as toxic. (Of course, I didn’t know, until I looked it up, that Persepolis was the capital of ancient Persia.)
Unfortunately, the “Persepolis” screening (for the National Board of Review) began early, while I arrived close to the appointed, 4 pm start time, and, therefore, missed the film’s opening 10-to-15 minutes. I was, of course, disoriented and further thrown off by the faux-naïve, or crudely styled drawings of the film’s black-and-white animation, which are interspersed with brief, arbitrary color sequences.
I found the history of Iranian repression chronicled in “Persepolis” audacious. It is viewed through the eyes of Marjane, as she grows from 5-to-18-year-old, a spoiled smartass from an upper class Iranian family that was revolutionary without anticipating the religious tyranny that would follow in the wake of the deposed Shah. On first viewing, I found this precocious brat nearly as offensive as did the stodgy Iranian authorities, who first made her, as they did with all women, wear the detested veil, then exiled her to a hard-knock-life in Vienna, and finally banished her to Paris.
I thought the creators were aiming for a Middle Eastern “Eloise” without the charm of the Plaza Hotel or Hilary Knight’s witty drawings. But I finally caught on to the fact–lacking, as I was at first, a press kit with the credits–that both the cartoon heroine, Marjane, and the animation’s creator bear the same first name, and that “Persepolis” was a humorous and only slightly exaggerated autobiography made from her horrifying upbringing.
Marjane Satrapi, 38, who created the French graphic novels titled “Persepolis,” made this, her filmmaking debut, by enlisting her French partner, Vincent Paronnaud, also a daring writer of satirical comics, and a large team of animators. I knew the word satrap referred to a provincial underling in the British colonial empire, but not that, in ancient times—the time of Persepolis–it bespoke a ruling class governor of a province. I didn’t know, until Satrapi told us, that black-and-white animation is more troublesome than color in terms of getting the correct placement of eyes in faces, among other things.
When, on first viewing, I found the film’s graphic whirl for flatulence its wittiest creation; when the divinity is presented as a conventionally robed and bearded Jehovah; when torture and exile, by a succession of Iranian rulers (only the deposed Shah’s name is mentioned) is somewhat trivialized by the picture’s satire of Iran’s oppressors; then I began to think that the unnamed Mullahs were smart to exile this wise gal, and I began to despise the film.
Yet I no longer do, because, after reading the complete, delectable graphic novels (published by Pantheon and offered by Sony to our group), I fell in love with the work. Being able to read the English captions/balloons (in book form) and to look at the naïve drawings without the interference of the English sub-titles or the French narration is a big bonus. I know that this film would play far better, for an English-speaking audience, in a dubbed version, but as French stars like Catherine Deneuve (as Marjane’s mother), Deneuve’s daughter, Chiara Mastroianni (as Marjane) and Danielle Darrieux (as Marjane’s grandmother) provide the splendid voices, that is not likely to happen. I prefer the book, but that is often true of film adaptations, except that this film is identical to the drawings of its source. In this instance, I read the text afterwards. Pick up a copy of “The Complete Persepolis.” and you will enjoy the film far more than I did. Moreover, you will possess all of the film’s deleted scenes long before next Christmas’s DVD for the film is incomplete.

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING

I was astonished to learn from the usually astute Nathan Lee, of The Village Voice, that Noah Baumbach’s “”Margot at the Wedding” (Paramount Vantage) “improves on “The Squid and The Whale,” which was the surprise hit of the 2005 Festival.” I found “Margot” an ambitious but confounding mess, though Manohla Dargis of The Times explained that it is marvelously French, in style, because of its “narrative rhythms and visual textures. . . and its quick, off-kilter scenes.” (Non-intellectual Rex Reed, in The New York Observer, calls it an “excruciating piece of ranting, empty-headed nothingness. . . it’s so bad, it’s dumbfounding.”)
And I thought that French directors, Godard excepted, were so fastidious, except for their bathing habits. Of whom can Manohla be thinking? And then I recalled the 2006 French film, “Dans Paris,” by Christophe Honore, which I attended, because Ms. Dargis had praised it highly, but which I found dreadful. Now I realize that what Manohla finds marvelous, I detest. She enjoys the hateful, as I do not. Although we both lust for Louis Garrel, only I seem to know that his films are wretched. Then again, Ms. Dargis is several decades younger than I am, so her tolerance for trendy dreck is less seasoned than mine.
Nathan Lee thinks that Nicole Kidman is “slightly miscast” as Margot Zeller, the neurotic writer whose every utterance is hateful. Margot has previously alienated her sister, Pauline, by savaging her first marriage in a splenetic New Yorker story. (It is alleged that Margot is based on Baumbach’s film critic mother, Georgia Brown, with Noah Baumbach himself as her adolescent son companion, but this may be because “The Squid and the Whale” was an autobiographical study of the writer-director’s dysfunctional family.)
Margot arrives with her androgynous child, Claude, to attend the wedding of her estranged sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, aka Mrs. Noah Baumbach), who is about to marry the flaky and repellent, unemployed screw-up, Malcolm (Jack Black), a deservedly failed artist. Margot, understandably, disapproves of this alliance, except that Pauline is preggers by Malcolm, and this is Saturday, and the wedding, on some unspecified seashore locale, north of New York City, is set to take place on Sunday. Moreover, Margot and her child are staying in the Zeller family manse, a ramshackle house which Pauline, rather than Margot, inherited, as guests of the long-estranged sister and her daughter, by her first marriage, as well as the super klutz, Malcolm.
Reunions of alienated siblings are always good for family drama, if a bit too convenient for giving us the whole Zeller family history. Moreover, an inherited house is an excellent source of sibling rivalry, although this house could badly use a makeover, as could the film’s successful, but shabbily-dressed producer, ovoid Scott Rudin in his drab, shlub’s sweater and scraggly beard.
I thought that Nicole Kidman was superb here as the envious, controlling, horrid sister (she says it’s her favorite bitch role, after the one she played in Van Sant’s 1995 “To Die For”) and I liked Jennifer Jason Leigh more than I ever have before. (As Mrs. Baumbach, JJL had her choice of roles and she took the less grateful one.) The hostile scenes between the sisters are sizzling, but the rest of the picture is rather dismal, despite Baumbach’s spiteful dialogue, because all of these characters are hateful. For hostile and sexually charged house parties, I still prefer Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” or Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night.”
There is also a frightful continuity error made by including an outdoor swimming scene, with trees in full bloom, when, throughout the rest of the picture, the trees are seasonally bare as they would be in, say, March or April. (Of course, most pools aren’t filled in March or April.) This is especially true of the stark, backyard tree that is a source of conflict with Pauline’s lower class, gonzo neighbors, and which, ultimately, crashes down on the wedding tent when Malcolm finally axes it.
Cutting down the family tree strikes me as overly metaphoric, like the sons jettisoning their dead father’s baggage at the end of “The Darjeeling Limited.” Of course, Scott Rudin, the producer of these two hapless pictures, may favor major metaphors. (The New York Post’s Lou Lumenick yokes both films together as “navel-gazing bores” for endlessly working through their writer-directors’ childhood family traumas.)
The swimming scene could really have benefited from cutting. Or, it could have been salvaged by keeping the camera tight on the pool and losing the blooming trees. But the film is full of such incongruities. Baumbach elected to use ‘70s lenses to make the night-lit bedroom scenes more authentic. But they only serve to make these scenes look hideously green and grainy. Then there is one confusing shot of a man picking up a flesh-colored object, which looks quite like a fetus doll, and then there’s the tall, blue-suited novelist, who is Margot’s adulterous lover, chasing Malcolm down a stairway to the beach, for what reason I know not. Why is a large, menacing folding knife opened without further use? Who is that red-haired lout who materializes and attacks Margot’s “daughter,” Claude (Zane Pais), who claims to have been bitten, although it looked like rape to me. I preferred to look away when Jack Black examined one protruding testicle in a bathroom mirror and lamented, “My scrotum is longer than my penis,” but then I cannot fathom the popularity of Jack Black, even in this subdued performance, any more than I can that endearing non-actor, Owen Wilson. This genital proclamation is Baumbach being crudely risqué, quite equivalent to Pauline’s admission to her sister, “I’ve pooped in my pants.” “We all do on occasion,” Margot soothes, and this film is Baumbach’s occasion.
It was not until the picture was over that I realized that others were confused by it as much as I was. The unkindly critic, John Simon, pointed out, at the press conference after the screening, that he had, all along, thought that Claude–possibly short for Claudia or Claudine–was a girl because “she” shared a room with Pauline’s daughter, had a similar high-pitched voice; and had an androgynous mop of curly hair. “If you mistook him for a girl,” Baumbach retorted from the stage, “that’s your problem!” Sorry, Noah, I thought so too, as well as thinking that Scott Rudin, who has too many film and theater projects in different stages of development every year, in addition to scouting and acquiring numerous books for adaptation, could use a capable dramaturge as well as a makeover artist. One man, however gifted, can’t fix everything himself.

I’M NOT THERE

If Manohla Dargis foolishly praised “Margot at the Wedding,” what can one say about the extravagant hype her colleague, A.O. Scott, lavished on Todd Haynes’ much-heralded “I’m Not There,” (The Weinstein Company), a multi-actor phantasmagoria, using Bob Dylan’s recordings but requiring six actors to play different aspects of Bob Dylan’s life or legend without ever being called by his assumed name. Curiously, although the youngest Dylan avatar is played by a ten-year old African-American, Marcus Carl Franklin, who calls himself “Woody Guthrie” and visits the dying Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital, there is no equivalent to the actual young Jew from Minnesota who changed his name from Zimmerman to the gentile, Welsh bard, Dylan when he hit New York City in 1960. (Bob Dylan, aged 19 in 1960, became a fixture in Greenwich Village folk clubs, coffee houses and at Guthrie’s hospital bedside where he sang Woody the folk pioneers’ songs which heavily influenced Dylan’s early folk songs of social protest.)
How The Times got hooked by the film’s publicist or the Weinsteins into giving the film the cover and eight pages in a recent New York Times Magazine, not to mention Scott’s encomium, defies belief, because the film is so dismal. Casting Cate Blanchett as a Dylan surrogate is inspired, not because her/his part is well written (the script by Oren Moverman and Haynes is witless and dreary), but because this actress is worth seeing even reading the phone book, which is the near equivalent of the deadly text. Of course, I never before thought of Dylan as in the least effeminate, but Blanchett and Ben Whishaw, who goes by the moniker of fey Arthur Rimbaud, (a 19th century French poet high on absinthe rather than pot) are considerably more interesting than Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Richard Gere, the other name players whom Haynes corralled into this dubious art film.
Rather than being an original achievement, the film seems inspired by Todd Solondz’s 2004 Festival entry, “Palindromes,” in which a 13-year-old, with the life force name of Aviva, wants desperately to get pregnant and does, as she is variously impersonated by a multitude of Avivas, including a black girl, and winding up as played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. The other writer-director Todd’s work was an equally wearisome stunt. Be warned or catch Martin Scorsese’s 4-hour Dylan documentary, “No Direction Home.”

Edited by Karl Johnson and Roy Frumkes

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