The Oscar-nominated animated movie Persepolis lost out to Pixar’s brilliant Ratatouille at this year’s Academy Awards yet I reckon it would have been an equally deserving winner. Released on DVD today, the film – hand-drawn and mostly in black and white – couldn’t be more different from the computer-animated wizardry of Ratatouille, but it’s been made with equal flair and wit. Rare among cartoons, though, it tells a story rooted in the real world – and a real life.
The life in question is that of the film’s co-director, the Paris-based Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi, who turned her experiences of growing up in Iran in the 1970s and 80s into a best-selling series of autobiographical graphic novels and has now successfully translated her unique vision to the screen.
We encounter Satrapi as a young girl living in Tehran during the last days of the despotic Shah. Her well-off left-wing parents at first welcome the Islamic revolution that overthrows the Shah in 1979 (when Marjane is nine), but as the ayatollahs tighten their grip on the country they come to decide that Iran is no place for a smart and stroppy kid whose idols are Bruce Lee and Karl Marx. So they send her at the age of 14 to Vienna, where she discovers punk music and boys. But she ultimately winds up feeling lost and alone in the liberal, secular West and returns to Tehran after four years, only to find her own country under the mullahs just as strange and alienating.
If this all makes Persepolis sound grim, don’t worry. Parts may be sad and others angry, but Satrapi’s movie is also warm, uplifting and often very funny. Which is more than can be said for George Clooney’s Leatherheads, also released on DVD today.
Set in the 1920s during the early days of professional American football, the movie finds Clooney in the role of Dodge Connelly, ageing captain of the near-bankrupt Duluth Bulldogs, who plans to save his failing team by recruiting the star player of the college game, war hero Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski, from the US TV version of The Office). Meanwhile, Renée Zellweger’s feisty Chicago reporter wants to uncover the truth behind Carter’s tales of World War One valour. As director and star, Clooney is attempting to recapture the zaniness of classic screwball comedies, but he fails lamentably. In the course of the action, Clooney’s Dodge frequently falls flat on his face in the mud – sadly, his film does the same.
