I grew up in Beijing

Frank 2021-12-15 08:01:06

One of the directors of "I Grow Up in Iran" (Persepolis), Maja Shatapi, grew up in Iran. This story is almost her autobiography. At this time, Marga was thirty-nine years old. She lived and worked in France. Not only did her comics sell well, she also won many comic awards. This film was adapted from her comics and won the Cannes Film Festival Jury Award last year. The Oscar competition for the best foreign language film.

For me, who also grew up in a Muslim family, the cordiality in the film does not lie in the religious atmosphere. The first time I watched the unsubtitled French version, I watched the lively young Majia buying the tape of "Iron Lady" on the black market. I just want to laugh. I think of buying mouthbands in Xidan when I was in high school. It’s also an “illegal” business. It contains universal adolescent rebellious tricks, and enjoys the popular rebellious fun in Western music, revealing the cuteness of girls. It's another taste to watch it again when the subtitles are under the subtitles. People, countries, and women in this world have too much in common, and many experiences are in common. The revolution in memory is a carnival in childhood. The expressions, words and deeds of adults are somewhat ridiculous in the eyes of children. Unable to understand, unable to empathize, and subtly in the growth. Like the little Majia in the film, changes in a country will permeate every aspect of life. China’s reforms and economic development are all in my personal memory. The subtleties of life are imprinted with thousands of images. The feeling of independence and no belonging in the soul is so similar. It is also the same as growing up in communist ideological education. When I was young, it was the local culture and youth that flourished, and the foreign culture surged in, followed by the tide of social changes. Cultural phenomenon to go. When I was a little girl, my parents seemed to be trendy. The youth brought all kinds of new gadgets. There were parties every week. The kindergarten listened to the tape recorders brought by the adults playing Taiwanese songs, watching various animations full of new ideas and old traditions. The bell-bottoms worn by young people in Hong Kong movies. When they arrived in elementary school, the "bad youth" in the neighborhood sang Cui Jian, the older children showed off when Jackson’s skin was healthy, and there were always novel books in bookstores. People dreamed of a beautiful Freedom is renewing every day in the outside world-the West... Looking back on it has become the past. Today I am like the Iranian woman sitting in the airport, staying in the era when there was an airport in my heart, and I was saddened by that airport. Unreal, the reality of passports and visas. Communism is still a naive and childish fantasy in childhood. After adolescence, capitalism is still the boring capitalism full of material and self-righteousness. The outside world is like a young, childish boy with physical desires, making simple girls quickly become A woman who knows how to compromise but is firm and independent inside, and understands the value of childhood dreams in her marriage after the compromise. The difference is that I have never experienced Iranian girls going back and forth at the airport. I am always at the airport at the beginning. Just like the unlucky person trapped in the airport in a comedy movie of the former Soviet Union, the reality and the inner airport overlap with the pick-up. Human moments, there is no waiting time, there is no Majia’s ticket, no Majia’s passport, my residence With the rapid expansion of the city’s economy and its migration to the outer suburbs, you can see planes flying through the sky from the window every day. There is no trajectory of Margaret turning in the sky to and from the airport. Seeing the extreme nationalism that is rising around me at this time, I yearn to dive down to the low place in my heart, lost and angry, cautiously resort to the keyboard-connected network, and indulge in the sound and light images downloaded from the network. The illusion transmitted to the outside world collided with the monitor and filled the reality of the entire room, and the illusion gradually lost its charm. Divorced Marga temporarily settled in France. I am unmarried, but I am already like an old woman. I have a very indifferent view of marriage and love. I can't even talk about the emptiness of ideals. My mentality has matured rapidly with the rapid economic development, but my heart is getting more and more. emptiness. Once in my mind, I often jumped out of comic-style imagination in my leisure time. Some associations that have nothing to do with life, simple and outrageous ideas, gradually turned into thinking about the actual landscape outside the car window when riding on the bus. These ideas quickly slipped through the field of vision. Until I get so tired every day when I get in the car and sleep with my eyes closed, I open my eyes when I hear the conductor calling out loudly at the end.

As a kind of art, the film is more and more closely connected with my life, and it has become more and more mathematical. The lens should be broken down to see, the space bar can pause the sound image in Baofeng Movie and Music at any time, and the dialogue is in the subtitles. , In Baidu, the WORD tool controls the number of words in each manuscript. It is becoming less and less artistic, but also artistic. Everything is designed, and this one must be designed to resemble Majia’s idea in the film, but it’s impossible. I don’t have the background, and I don’t have the mature and innocent and lively mentality.

Being a Muslim family, my parents know communism better, which is different from the fact that Majia’s parents believed in communism in Iran, which is Islamic fundamentalism. My understanding of Islam comes from data, not from my parents. In my childhood, I knew only taboos about religion and nothing else. Only when I searched the background information of this film did I learn about the Persian miniature paintings. The expression of Marga’s stream of consciousness reveals the delicate details of the miniature paintings, revealing the author, and the witty use of expressionism in the painting style. I can see it at a glance. I am more familiar with Munch’s "Howl". When Marga’s fate is about to be implicated in Vienna, the street lights distorted into a howling until the airstrikes such as Godzilla came, and the little Maga showed up at a young age. The reality is as exaggerated as expressionism. The soldiers who fell collectively in the war looked like a kind of Arabic script. Majia used a woman's ingenuity to infiltrate political history into the story of a woman's growth, maintaining the temperament of an innocent little girl, and her innocent perspective. The comic style implies traditional art and modern art, and the personal experience of life in the picture uses multiple angles. Perspective performance, the part of the narration is all flat side performance, the part mixed with romantic imagination is like painting, the rhythm is as bright as the line rhythm of the patterns in Arab art, black and white shows the colors of Iranian women, and the rebelliousness of an Iranian woman is in self-deprecation. liberation.



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Extended Reading

Persepolis quotes

  • Marjane as a teenager: Promise you won't ask me any questions.

  • Marjane's grandmother: [watering flowers] Ha. Serves them right. Why you practically snipped off their little thingies. Will you please take off that god-awful veil? It makes me claustrophobic.

    Marjane as a teenager: [takes off her veil] I'm so used to it, I forget I'm wearing it.