Love and death in prerevolutionary Iran

All eyes were on “Persepolis” in 2007. With Iran in the news, there was a thirst to understand the Islamic republic, and the animated adaptation of the autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, who grew up in the country but now lives in France, looked to fit the bill.

Co-written and co-directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, “Persepolis” proved a bit of a disappointment, however. The increased freedom that the animated form might have given the collaborators seemed wasted in this movie that was ostensibly about successive regimes that wanted to rule men’s souls, but didn’t seem to have a soul itself.