Format: Cinema

Premiere: 5 June 2008

Venue: Curzon Soho, London

The premiere will be attended by director Bruce Weber who will take questions from the audience. The Curzon Soho are also screening a retrospective of Weber’s work on June 14-15, including his acclaimed short The Teddy Boys of the Edwardian Drape Society and his debut feature Broken Noses.

Release date: 6 June 2008

Distributor Metrodome

Director: Bruce Weber

USA 1988

115 minutes

DVD to be released by Metrodome on 28 July 2008.

A prodigiously talented, self-taught jazz trumpeter, Chet Baker began his spectacular, lauded career in the early 1950s and carved out a singular pathway through the history of jazz.

Baker’s melodious, lyrical style was traditional and conservative when compared with the developing experimental Free Jazz scene of the 1950s and 60s, yet despite this he became popular on the bohemian/beatnik jazz circuit, rocketing to fame in his early 20s when the photographer William Claxton produced a series of iconic images of the young James Dean lookalike. Over the years his formidable musical skills made him a legend, but a wild, erratic lifestyle became his downfall, leading to heroin addiction, prison sentences and ultimately his untimely demise, aged 58 – shortly after this film was completed – when he fell out of a high window to his death. Retroactively this gives Let’s Get Lost an ominous, portentous quality.

Bruce Weber’s 1988 documentary portrait has, at its heart, an irreducible mystery: Baker himself, who is an elusive, obscure presence, hardly allowing the filmmaker or the audience into his opaque inner life and thoughts; the fundamental passions, drives and motivations behind his cool, seemingly unruffled exterior. After a meandering, restless tour through the US and Europe, we are left little the wiser as to who the ‘real’ Chet Baker actually is and why he later became drug-dependent, abandoned his family and had such volatile, fractious love affairs. Most of Baker’s persona is elliptically constructed through observations and revelations from family, ex-wives, girlfriends and acolytes, who are probably a more reliable source in their subjective portrayals of him than his own somewhat cagey, stilted exposition, gradually and patiently coaxed out by the director.

Weber’s style alludes to a range of cinematic tropes: from the abstract camera angles and stark black and white chiaroscuro of film noir to the grainy, rough-edged flexibility of cinéma vérité and the French New Wave, redolent of Godard, the Maysles brothers, Cassavetes and Haskell Wexler. The director composes, photographs and edits his film in much the same way his subject performs – there is an unrehearsed, immediate, open-ended feel to the scenes where Baker riffs on how he conned his way out of the army or got his teeth smashed out in a fight. Weber reinforces this fairly unstructured, yet quietly designed and captivating ambience through the subtle use of techniques like audio overlay, as when an interviewee’s voice encroaches onto – but somehow smoothly combines with – footage of Baker softly crooning or eliciting a plaintive, mellifluous melody from his trumpet. This irresolute audio-visual quality perfectly appropriates and is synonymous with the free-flowing, spontaneous nature of jazz, although the inexplicable paucity of film clips of Baker’s wonderful trumpet playing – his raison d’í­Âªtre – is a glaring weakness.

Nevertheless, this slow-burning, nostalgic elegy to an artist’s free-spirited youth and his one eternal love, music, is a timeless capsule of a fleeting, intense and unbridled life, made all the more poignant by the tragic death of its star.

James DC

The summer print issue of Electric Sheep is a jazz and cinema special to coincide with the re-release of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a heart-rending, soulful monochrome gem. To celebrate the belated recognition of one of American independent cinema’s greats, we look at the influence of jazz on film in the US with articles on Shirley Clarke, John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch and Beat cinema among others. For more information on where to buy the magazine and how to subscribe, please contact amanda [at] wallflowerpress.co.uk.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 30 May 2008

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Cristian Nemescu

Writers: Cristian Nemescu, Tudor Voican

Cast: Armand Assante, Maria Dinulescu, Razvan Vasilescu, Jamie Elman

Romania 2006

155 mins

It’s unfortunate that Cristian Nemescu’s debut feature will most likely be viewed mainly as a promising work-in-progress. The tragic death of the 27-year-old writer/director in 2006 left the film unfinished, and the final cut was compiled according to what was known of his intentions. In spite of this, what emerges is a compelling story that triumphs on several levels.

California Dreamin’ begins with a gritty black and white prologue detailing the brutal bomb attacks on Romania during the Second World War and outlining the paradoxes of the situation: frantic locals cry out for American support while an unexploded shell bearing a ‘Made in USA’ logo crashes through an inhabited building.

Flash forward 55 years and the country finds itself in the middle of another military crisis, this time the conflict in Kosovo. A NATO-commissioned radar is being transported by train into Romania to aid the accuracy of air raids on Serbia. Due to the covert and urgent nature of the cargo, there was no time to obtain the necessary customs documents. Under guard from the US army, headed by Captain Doug Jones (an inspired Armand Assante), the train runs into trouble when it is stopped in the small village of Capalnita by bitter stationmaster Doiarum, who demands to see all relevant documentation before it can proceed. During the unplanned stopover, the young army officers mix with the small traditional community.

At the heart of the collision of cultures is Doiarum’s daughter Monica, a striking 17-year-old who commands the attention of every boy in town, yet secretly wants to escape the constricted future that awaits her in Capalnita. The influx of American soldiers not only stimulates her hormones but also her desire to leave, much to the dismay of her father who has positioned himself as a figure of authority within the community. Captain Jones sees this control as tyrannical, and soon looks to convince the locals to overthrow him, bringing the future of the village into question.

One of Nemescu’s greatest achievements is the way in which the vast historical context is weaved seamlessly with engagingly human strands of narrative, without ever feeling contrived. There’s no formulaic love story subplot; rather, the relationship between Monica and her American lover develops organically amidst the push and pull of external events. While the film is infused with allegorical meaning it never feels like Nemescu is consciously trying to get a point across. Instead, the social significance of the Americans’ arrival is perfectly demonstrated through events such as the party scene, where the excited locals invite the soldiers to a celebration complete with a Romanian Elvis tribute act.

While it is uncertain that this is the cut of the film Nemescu would have chosen, its win of the ‘Un Certain Regard’ prize at Cannes last year demonstrates the significance and accomplishment of the director’s efforts, a posthumous success tinged with sadness as one can only imagine what this young talent could have gone on to achieve.

James Merchant

Format: Cinema

Sci-Fi London preview: 1 May 2008, Apollo West End (London)

Release date: 16 May 2008

Venues: ICA and key cities8

Distributor: Dogwoof Pictures

Director: Esteban Sapir

Writer: Esteban Sapir

Cast: Alejandro Urdapilleta, Valeria Bertuccelli

Argentina 2007

90 mins

The best film I’ve seen so far this year just happens to be one that pretends the last 80 years haven’t happened. I’m a big fan of silent movies, particularly ones which exemplify the avant-garde and the nebulous crossover between fine art and film – Buí±uel and Dulac, Wiene and Lang, Eisenstein and Vertov. With the birth of sound, few filmmakers whose work had links with fine art continued to let their films show this influence. There are exceptions to this rule – Jean Cocteau for one and more recently Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman in this country – but generally ‘art’ films became relegated to the niche genre of ‘experimental’ cinema.

Perhaps film art needs to be silent or at least have a less distracting soundtrack than the multi-layered cacophony that increasingly dominates modern cinema. A soundtrack negates the need for words on screen beyond the brand names of objects and signposts; however, the absorption of words through the eye rather than the ear has perhaps a greater effect on the subconscious, as the viewer has to rely solely on visual interpretation rather than cadence for the meaning of language. In the modern world where arguments are generated by the lack of a smile or a raised eyebrow in an e-mail or text message, this is something that deserves greater attention. Many sound films lose something in translation due to either the schizophrenic need for the viewer to read text at the bottom of the screen while the action progresses, or dubbing, which loses the flavour of the original intent.

There has been the occasional silent movie in recent years – the terrific slapstick comedy I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, which never got a proper release due to problems with the distribution company, and an acclaimed episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (‘Hush’); there have been sound movies that used text on screen – Stille dage i Clichy (Quiet days in Clichy, 1970) and Batman (1966); but La Antena is possibly the most successful combination of visuals and text I’ve seen outside of a comic book. Ironically, since comics have recently become such a major source of inspiration for movies, it’s surprising that no one has used the text(ual) aspects of comics on screen, outside of the odd panel intro in Ang Lee’s confused Hulk adaptation.

In La Antena, even though we are dealing with a film that is self-consciously avant-garde and is bound to end up with a cult / niche following, the presence of text on screen and lack of spoken word is explained by a plot device rather than simply being part of the structure of the film. Perhaps the filmmakers were mindful of the career of Canadian director Guy Maddin, one of the few other modern proponents of silent movies, who even goes so far as using hand-cranked cameras for authenticity, and has been unable to attract an audience beyond his cult following. The world of the film is one that combines Tales of Hoffman and 1984, where a totalitarian regime has literally removed the voice of the people. When characters in this world speak, letters appear in the air in front of their faces and all the contrivances of speech are given a visual alternative – for example if one character wants to obscure the speech of another he’ll put his hand in front of the text in the air so another can’t read it. On top of this conceit, other surrealist touches are added – telephones have video screens that show the speaker’s lips in close-up (so presumably the person holding the phone can lip-read), as do loud hailers and face masks (which resemble oversized televisions). Elsewhere, the landscape itself is given a Borgesian / Gilliam-esque aspect with the topography literally made out of the pages from a book.

Visually, the film is stunning, but unlike many of the silent movies that influenced the film, the actors have the benefit of modern training and don’t have to resort to theatrical exaggeration the way their forebears might have. That said, the film isn’t perfect and some visual effects resort too heavily to artifice – the snow covering a sinister car looks a little too much like soap foam and the solid glycerine tears that form on some of the characters’ cheeks are too close to a pop video gag or an Andy Kaufman sketch. While a visual reference to Metropolis is just about reasonable in terms of historical reference, the uses of a Swastika and Star of David to represent good and evil is absurdly heavy-handed and pulls the viewer out of the meticulously formed fantasy world of the film.

These qualms aside, this is one of the bravest and most innovative films in years, one that combines the tools of the past and the latest technology to create a beguiling, timeless film.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 16 May 2008

Distributor: Trinity Filmed Entertainment

Director: Nicolas Klotz

Writers: Elisabeth Perceval, Franí§ois Emmanuel

Original title: La question humaine

Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Michael Lonsdale, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Lou Castel

France 2007

135 mins

Playing the villain in a James Bond film can have calamitous consequences for an actor’s career. With that in mind and Quantum of Solace looming on the horizon, UK cinema-goers should treat Heartbeat Detector as a chance to see the great Mathieu Amalric in a good film while they still can.

Amalric plays Simon Kessler, an in-house recruiter and psychologist at the Paris subsidiary of a German chemical company who is tasked with assessing the mental health of his CEO, Mathias Jí¼st (Michael Lonsdale). However, Jí¼st’s response to Simon’s enquiries is that his disturbing behaviour is a result of something he knows about the executive who gave Simon his assignment, Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon). Namely, that Rose was one of the orphans brought up in the Lebensborn camps built by Heinrich Himmler’s SS. To further complicate matters, in the course of his investigation Simon finds some anonymous letters which suggest that it is in fact Jí¼st, not Rose, who may have ties to the Holocaust.

Lonsdale is one of the few exceptions to the Bond baddie rule mentioned above; in Moonraker, he played a billionaire industrial who tried to wipe out humanity using chemical weapons in order to repopulate the Earth with his own master race and director Nicolas Klotz makes full use of the associations he brings to the role of Jí¼st. However, while this is ostensibly a corporate thriller, Klotz is not saying that corporations commit genocide or that Nazis responsible for atrocities during the Second World War went into big business immediately afterwards. Instead, the film works on a more philosophical level. Thinking and even hallucinating about the Holocaust causes Simon to see the parallels between the dehumanising, dead language used by technicians at the Chelmno concentration camp – where the technique of feeding exhaust fumes back into vans to exterminate Jews was first used – and the language of corporate capitalism. Employees are not humans, they’re ‘units’. They’re not fired, the company is ‘downsized’. Klotz’s concern is that this suppressed humanity will find dark outlets, for example through mental illness and violence. Amalric is the perfect choice to play the product of this system as he has the same unpredictable, dangerous quality as other great actors such as Jack Nicholson.

Throughout the film Klotz offers several other possible languages, culminating in the final scene where Simon reads a list of the victims at Chelmno over a black screen, each name pregnant with meaning. The director also uses music to powerful effect with a soundtrack that includes Schubert and New Order as well as a great original score by the French musician Syd Matters. At 135 minutes the film is a bit too long, but this is cinema at its most thought-provoking.

Alexander Pashby

Format: Cinema

Release date: 8 May 2008

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director: Fumihiko Sori

Writers: Haruka Handa, Fumihiko Sori

Japan 2007

109 mins

Coming across as a greatest hits package of both recent animé and science fiction movies in general from the last 25 years, Vexille combines the clichés of Japanese manga and cartoons – soldiers in mecha suits, androids who debate the nature of humanity, evil conspiracies demonising the Japanese nation – with over-familiar imagery such as giant sand worms that eat everything in their path (Dune, Tremors, Beetlejuice etc.). You could over-intellectualise this conceptual thievery – most technological advancements are based on retrofitting previous knowledge or machinery – but just because the self-consciously hip soundtrack (Paul Oakenfold, Basement Jaxx, DJ Shadow et al.) is from a genre that uses samples and repetition to create something new, it doesn’t mean the plot should follow the same principle.

The story is set in 2077. Japan has been incommunicado from the rest of the world for a decade after refusing to comply with a world ban on android technology – it’s OK for us to use machines to better ourselves, but not for them to start looking like us – and no one has been able to penetrate the electronic shield raised around the country to see what they’ve been up to. After ten years have passed, a representative from the most powerful corporation in Japan arranges a meeting on American soil with leaders of the UN and it’s not long before Japanese android terrorists are fighting it out with SWORD, the UN’s special-ops division. Yet again, the self-destructive nature of Japanese culture during WWII casts a long shadow on that country’s speculative fiction. It seems almost perverse for a Japanese movie to cast Americans as the heroes and themselves as the villains – perhaps this is a comment on the loss of national identity in the face of soulless corporations, but the script isn’t subtle or incisive enough to make that idea apparent.

In the film’s defence, the action sequences are terrifically exciting, which is the very least you might expect from the director of the live action manga adaptation Ping Pong, a movie that presented a table top sport competition like a scene cut from The Matrix. The choice of Fumihiko Sori as director clearly indicates that Vexille is a project aiming to compete with live action blockbusters, and at times the film just about holds its own against the likes of last year’s Die Hard and Transformers updates. However, for a CGI film to be as successful as live action, (particularly as Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture films are blurring the distinction between the two) everyone involved has to be at the top of their game, and too many scenes of this film are indistinguishable from generic inter-level sequences in computer games. Aesthetically, the high-contrast shading of the animation gives the CGI a distinctive look that is more pleasing to the eye than computer graphics that strive for perfect realism (pace Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) but this look could have been pushed further, perhaps along the lines of the under-rated Renaissance.

Since the writer, producer and composer all collaborated on the recent remake of Appleseed, it’s difficult to understand why they didn’t pick a dated animé or an as-yet unfilmed manga for a CGI update instead of lavishing their efforts on such a derivative ‘new’ story. Central to the problem is the eponymous lead character: just like her Hollywood sisters Lara Croft and Catwoman, female agent Vexille is not much more than a fighting doll. Aside from a few exceptions – The Long Kiss Goodnight and Nikita come to mind – Hollywood doesn’t seem to realise that strong female characters need to be defined by more than pert breasts and a catsuit. Unfortunately, the makers of Vexille are so keen to emulate American blockbusters that they simply reproduce their most glaring failings.

For thirteen-year-old boys who’ve never seen a CGI or animé film aimed at them, this is passable entertainment. However, the choice of director and composer for this project suggests that the filmmakers wanted this movie to exceed the limitations of the medium, apparently unaware that they needed more than regurgitated clichés to achieve the sublime mastery of a Hayao Miyazaki or Mamoru Oshii. Sadly, Vexille will only confirm animé critics’ worst fears and stereotypes.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 May 2008

Venues: London and key cities

Distributor: Vertigo Films

Director: Jeff Nichols

Writer: Jeff Nichols

Cast: Michael Shannon, Douglas Ligon, Barlow Jacobs

USA 2007

92 mins

The concept of revenge permeates popular fiction, often resulting in some form of self-redemption that eases one’s bottled rage and hostility. Throughout the history of cinema, audiences have typically travelled on this journey alongside the enraged protagonist, awaiting their moment of triumph with excited anticipation. Taking note of this narrative trend, first-time writer-director Jeff Nichols presents a film in which two distinctly related groups desire revenge on each other.

Set against the backdrop of rural Arkansas, Shotgun Stories follows an escalating feud between two sets of half-brothers who differ in every way save for one side of their parental heritage. We are first introduced to Son, Boy and Kid Hayes, born to a drunk father who didn’t have the dignity to give his offspring names and rejected by a mother who was too bitter to care for them. The father, who left the family home only to clean up, find God and start a new life, fathered four more sons who were given real names and the upbringing they deserved. When both sets of brothers hear of their father’s death and are brought together at the funeral, their previously harboured hostilities are revealed and escalate as each side makes their next move.

Taking what is an interesting premise, Nichols crafts a story that unfortunately lacks compelling characterisation. While his aim is clearly to demonstrate how revenge ultimately has no victors, each set of brothers are given few qualities that distinguish them from one another, to the extent where you don’t really care who receives the next inevitable strike. While the poorer, unkempt brothers are given more screen time, the film focusing on their bid to divulge the dark secrets of their father’s previous life, they are equally as unlikable as their more affluent siblings, who are dead set on upholding his clean image.

The film does have redeeming qualities, particularly in the way Nichols characterises the landscape through the narrative, creating a sense of the vast and ghostly nature of Southern Arkansas. However, next to this year’s giants No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, which also deal with masculine themes within a dusty, rural America, Shotgun Stories pales in comparison.

James Merchant

Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 April 2008

Venues: ICA, London and key cities

Distributor: Tartan

Director: Park Chan-wook

Writers: Jeong Seo-Gyeong, Park Chan-wook

Original title: Saibogujiman kwenchana

Cast: Lim Su-jeong, Rain

South Korea 2006

105 minutes

After three films that revelled in such dark issues as organ theft, incest and child kidnapping, wrapped in the key theme of revenge, it seems understandable that Park Chan-wook chose a lighter tone for his next project, the inventively titled I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK. That’s not to say, however, that in doing so he has compromised the exploration of challenging subjects and the creative characterisation that distinguished his earlier work. Here, he weaves a tale that could be described as a berserk romantic comedy, but beyond such classification he offers a film that bursts with quirky ingenuity and striking visual beauty.

Brought up by an eccentric grand-mother who was convinced she was a rodent, Cha Young-goon (an excellent Lim Su-jeong) sees herself as a ‘sort of human robot’ who needs battery power to function. This leads her to electrocute herself and she winds up being locked up in a mental institution, where she meets an array of misfits afflicted with similarly bizarre conditions. Amidst the chaos she finds the enigmatic Park Il-Sun (Korean pop star Rain), a mysterious young man who claims to have the ability to steal other people’s souls.

In spite of its outlandish premise, the real strength of Park’s film lies in its wholly unconventional approach to the theme of mental illness, which is generally portrayed either through bleak realism or optimistic drama. Rather than focusing on the restrictive and depressing nature of mental disability, Park instead invites us to directly experience life through the wacky mindset of his characters, making their bizarre pursuits and undertakings not only exciting but also strangely touching. There is a particularly poignant moment when Il-Sun comes up with a compelling ploy to convince Young-goon to eat: believing food will cause her to malfunction she is close to starving herself to death so he creates a device that he says turns food into electrical energy, thus saving her life.

I’m A Cyborg does have its flaws, particularly in its slightly inconsistent script, which at times causes the film to drag, though this is largely overcome through Jeong Jeong-hun’s stunning cinematography. Having worked with Park since Oldboy, he creates flamboyant visuals that live up to the impressively surreal scenes featured in Lady Vengeance. While many may flinch at Park’s change in direction, as evidenced by the film’s poor reception in his native Korea, those who embrace I’m A Cyborg‘s lovable quirks will find much to enjoy.

James Merchant

Read the interview with Park Chan-wook.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 April 2008

Venue: Odeon Camden, Covent Garden, Whiteleys, Wimbledon (London) and key cities

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Michael Haneke

Alternative title Funny Games US

Cast Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet

USA 2007

107 minutes

Michael Haneke has done a Gus Van Sant and remade his own controversial 1997 film almost frame for frame, only in a US setting and with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as the hapless, well-off couple tortured by two freakily polite young men decked in immaculate white tennis outfits. The purpose of the film in both its incarnations is to challenge the public’s consumption of violent cinematic fare for pleasure and it certainly succeeds. The introductory scene sets the tone: a couple and their teenage son are on their way to their lakeside home, playing an urbane game of ‘name the classical tune’ to while the drive away. Suddenly a hellish death metal piece by John Zorn crashes onto the screen, jarring with the peaceful family tableau and sonically assaulting the audience. Funny Games sustains its all-out attack on the viewer to the very end, inducing a nauseous unease that lasts well after the final credits have rolled.

The tone is chillingly cold and detached, making the film feel almost like some kind of scientific experiment performed on the audience. As Paul and Peter play supremely cruel games with the family – the use of the golf balls is brilliantly sadistic – Haneke himself pitilessly manipulates the audience, setting us up to extract specific emotions from us. While the family’s undeniable smugness makes it difficult to feel any real sympathy for them, we desperately want them to survive as the director successfully forces us to identify with their suffering. Simultaneously, however, Haneke uses self-reflexive devices, as when Paul winks at the camera, or when he rewinds the images after events take a turn that does not suit him, and in that way makes us complicit with the killers, with the ‘funny’ games that they’re playing. But this film is the anti-Reservoir Dogs, and those scenes certainly don’t raise a chuckle, Haneke taking any idea of ‘fun’ out of the violence by putting all of his directing talent into the task of making us feel the family’s every jolt of pain and fear. So why watch such a film, you may ask. Precisely because through the unpleasantness of the experience Haneke intelligently probes our voyeuristic consumption of violence. And while I for one would certainly not support a blanket neo-puritan condemnation of violence on film, the recent glut of senseless ‘torture-porn’ movies such as Saw and Hostel makes Haneke’s provocative reflection all the more timely.

Haneke has claimed that he agreed to remake the film in the US because he’d always thought of Funny Games as an American story, meant for an American audience, the original film being made in Austria only for budgetary reasons. How odd though that a director of Haneke’s quality would want to waste his time in what seems like a pointless repetition, in the – misguided? – hope that a larger American audience will see his film. What’s more, having two highly recognisable actors in the central roles makes the story feel somewhat less real, and therefore less affecting. That said, the US version is (almost) as devastatingly powerful as the original, and it is certainly worth seeing if you missed it the first time round.

Virginie Sélavy

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 April 2008

Distributor Optimum

Director: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

Writers: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

France 2007

95 mins

Fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism – these are the three elements making up the axis of evil which Marjane Satrapi hoped to disassociate from Iran when she started her graphic novels Persepolis – The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis – The Story of a Return. Like her fellow countrymen who refer to themselves as Persian instead of Iranian in order to conjure up images of beautiful cats and carpets rather than holocaust threats and gay deniers, Satrapi was fed up with the narrow vision of her birthplace that has been projected to the outside world. She wanted to tell the tale of a country that has battled for an enlightened independence in the face of the oil-hungry West and the puritanical elements from within. Converted for the cinema screen, Persepolis is a marvel. The original drawings have been expertly rendered for film and the pace is punchy despite both novels being thrown in together.

As with films such as Ví­Â­ctor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive the film begins by showing social conditions and war-time history through the eyes of a child. Satrapi’s depiction of herself as a forthright, stubborn and fanciful child who believes she is the next holy prophet and later dons a headscarf to march around her house chanting, ‘Down with the Shah’ is utterly enchanting. But disturbing also, insofar that the views of those around her can easily translate into misunderstanding and cruelty. In one scene, armed with a handful of nails and a mindful of torture techniques she gets her friends to gang up against a boy whose father she hears was in the Shah’s secret police. Similarly, Satrapi shows a ‘my dad is bigger than your dad’ one-upmanship among the children as they compare the heroism of various family members imprisoned for their political beliefs.

As she grows up, her political conscience sharpens and she finds herself the subject of scorn from the so-called Guardians of the Revolution who catch her buying pop music records on the black market, and from the teachers at school who object to her questioning their authority and their doctrine. This is a story that is as much about the growth of a nation as about Satrapi’s growth as an individual as she faces life in a country so restricted by political and religious wrangling.

With the fundamentalists in power growing ever more oppressive, her parents send her to school in Austria where she falls in with an outcast crew of hippies and nihilists. With this chapter, the films takes on a slightly lighter tone, charting her adolescent life with its romances and insecurities. Whatever darkness there is here comes not from the regime outside but from within, from Satrapi feeling isolated, heartbroken and homesick. One of the film’s most touching moments comes when, alone during the festive period, she receives a phone call from her parents in Iran. Both parties feign an upbeat tone to avoid revealing how bitterly unhappy the distance makes them feel.

With her character’s eventual return to Iran and her consequent depression, Satrapi makes clear the dichotomy between feeling free yet lonely in Europe, and feeling oppressed yet surrounded by her family in Iran. Displaced and caught between two cultures, she feels like an outsider in both places.

The film’s ultimate strength lies in its ability to engage with heavy politics and powerful emotions with the lightest of touches. Not only does the animated form convey the issues with style, but even the most challenging parts of the film are made easier to watch thanks to Satrapi’s mischievous sense of humour. As she claws her way out of depression, a heavily-accented rendition of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ takes over the soundtrack to hilarious effect for example, while the most ridiculous elements of the Islamic regime are brilliantly lampooned by the children in Satrapi’s school.

With its warm-hearted, individual vision of the many different people that make up the nation of Iran, the film sharply rebukes simplifications of the ‘axis of evil’ type. In that perspective, Satrapi’s original goal has been victoriously achieved.

Lisa Williams

Read the interview with Marjane Satrapi.