Persepolis

director: Marjane Satrapi
year: 2007

Animated, autobiographical reminiscences about an Iranian girl growing up amidst the political and intellectual tumult of 1970s-80s Teheran. With side plots about Western Europe. Catherine Deneuve performs one of the voices.


As a story about one girl's experience in a far-away land, Persepolis is charming. The simple pictures fit the simple story, and there's a sharpness to the presentation that lends lightness and wit to what could have been an unbearably heavy and sombre procession of personal missteps and tragedies.

But, is this all the film is? Not by a long shot. Whether Satrapi intended it or not—and she probably did—Persepolis is also an introduction to Iran and its history aimed at a Western audience. The coming of age story happens against a historical and political backdrop. And how this backdrop is presented is, in turn, influenced by Satrapi's own childhood: growing up with her leftist intellectual parents—who feature prominently in the film—as well as exposure to their friends and ideologies.


Indeed, one of the film's heroic figures is Marji's Communist uncle, who, after being rejected by his Shah-loving family, swims to Moscow and gets a degree in Marxism-Leninism, then returns and fights for a better Iran—only to be jailed and martyred by that bastard Shah and his authoritarian government. What Marji doesn't tell us, however, is that what her saintly uncle was actually doing was helping establish and defend an Azeri breakaway republic in Northern Iran that was little else than a Soviet puppet state meant to further Stalin's designs on the rest of Iran. So here's your point of view conundrum: is uncle a freedom-loving hero murdered by an oppressive regime, or is he a treasonous imperial lackey? The problem, of course, is that Satrapi doesn't let us sort out this conundrum. She tells us: uncle wanted freedom and equality and the Shah killed him and others like him; therefore, the Shah is bad. Well, sure. But block out enough context and play around with perspective and anything can seem so simple. After all, what was Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch if not a tragic, failed attempt at creating a better Germany that was violently suppressed by a repressive government hellbent on clinging to power? Those Weimer goons were evil people.


Another strange thing about Persepolis is that while the Shah makes several appearances in the film (there's an interesting vignette told as a children's story and animated as puppet theatre about Reza Khan being installed by the British in exchange for access to oil, for example) Khomeini doesn't show up at all! The 1979 Revolution happens, is shown, and things take a turn for the worse, but it's hardly made clear why women suddenly have to cover up or why Marji has to buy her Iron Maiden records on the black market. It wouldn't be illogical for a viewer with no knowledge of Iranian history to assume that, well, it's all the Shah's fault. Why Satrapi chose to do things this way, I don't know. I can only hazard a political estimate of a guess. And it's the same guess that would explain why, while there's no Khomeini, there is direct mention of the CIA teaching torture.


Welcome to Vienna. It's also odd that Christian crosses in Austria loom larger than Islamic moons in Iran—where, more than religion, it's patriarchy that's the problem, with bearded men running the show and the country divided between modest, black-clad women and leery, lecherous men. The university that Marji attends is a prime example, as Satrapi illustrates a school meeting with shawled young women on one side and relaxed young men on the other.


Two more scenes:

In the first, Marji's mother has a run-in with an unpleasant fellow in the supermarket parking lot (after declaring, to two old women fighting over what's left on the shelves, "each must take according to her needs"). Her scarf isn't on, he tells her to put it on, she tells him to have some respect, and he yells at her:

"Women like you, I fuck them against the walls!"

Years later, as Marji runs down a Teheran street, two policemen in a car gesture for her to stop. She does. "When you're running, your behind makes indecent moves," one of the men tells her. Her retort, just before she starts running again:

"Then don't look at my ass!"


An aside: There's a scene in Persepolis in which a woman finds out that the director in charge of a hospital, that is refusing to send her husband West for a life-saving operation, used to wash her windows and has been promoted to the position merely on political grounds. He has a beard, so to speak. In Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a doctor works as a window washer after being demoted for political reasons. His beard wasn't red enough.


The film's most interesting character is Marji's grandmother. Half feminist, half traditionalist, altogether unique, she fills her bra with jasmine petals every morning and utters what becomes the defining advice in Marji's life: be true to yourself, don't mind the assholes. It's advice that Marji eventually takes to heart and that, for all its flaws, the film does, too. No one can accuse Satrapi of crafting anything but a very personal film. Hence, how much you like it might well come down to how much you agree with her interpretation of history, accept her ideological stance, and share her interest in the holy trinity of contemporary history: race, class, and gender.


But, even if you don't, the pictures are rather nice.