Dressed in black and looking for all the world like a panel
from one of her own comics, cartoonist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi
sat smoking in a conference room at the Hotel Monaco, a mole on her
nose just like the dot found on the face of her two-dimensional
counterpart—the bold, irreverent heroine of her autobiographical
graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis II. When I asked
her if she was allowed to smoke in the room, she looked at me
pityingly, as though the question revealed the timidity of my
fundamentally conventional soul: “No, I am not, but I do it anyway. If
I didn’t do what was forbidden, I would die.”
Turns out that the similarities between Marjane the cartoon and
Marjane the person don’t end with the dot on her nose: In the flesh,
Satrapi is just as outspoken and passionate as she presents herself in
her books. Satrapi’s 2-D doppelganger has recently gotten new life on
the big screen, in an excellent animated treatment that condenses the
events of the two books into a frank, poignant coming-of-age story that
surpasses its source material in both visual elegance and storytelling
economy.
The story opens in Iran on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, in
which the Shah’s monarchy was overthrown and replaced with a repressive
fundamentalist regime. The young Marjane, spunky and outspoken, chafes
at the restrictions placed on her—rebelling by listening to Iron
Maiden and questioning why girls must wear headscarves, until her
parents send her to study in Vienna. In Austria, she finds that her
fellow students identify her with the very cultural ideas she left Iran
to escape; but when she returns to Iran, she finds she no longer fits
in there, either.
Marjane’s struggle to define herself is at the heart of the film, a
struggle that wrenches her away from her family and across cultural
comfort zones. The story is told beautifully, black-and-white
hand-drawn images and simple effects conveying both the ugliness of an
oppressive regime and the simple, sweet nostalgia of childhood
remembered.
When I asked Satrapi if her film had a political agenda, she
demurred, insisting that Persepolis is first and foremost a
coming-of-age story that “could have happened anywhere, to anyone.”
“Political for me is like a leaflet. Political movies give answers.
I don’t have any answers, only questions,” she told me. “We started the
movie two and a half years ago, and Iran was really not a subject of
interest then. It happens that it is now, which is appropriate…
because maybe it could make people think that these people you are
scared of, they are not people with knives between their teeth, waiting
to kill the Westerners. They are just people. If the film could help
people just look at others as human beings [then] that is the biggest
goal that I could have in my life. I don’t have any more pretensions
than that. That’s already a lot.”