Persepolis: Iran Through a Child’s Eyes
When it comes to telling the story of a country like Iran, it’s hard to know where to begin. For an American, the situation may seem rather simple: an underdeveloped country naturally turned to fundamentalist authoritarianism, but the story couldn’t be further from the truth. Iran is an extremely diverse country with revolutionary secular thinkers and reactionary religious rulers. As the characters in Persepolis lament the changes that have come from the 1979 revolution and the freedom they used to have, they say, “to think, it was the same country.” Persepolis, based on the books by Marjane Satrapi and directed by herself and Vincent Paronnaud, tells a complicated and foreign story, but by taking the perspective of a young girl living through it all, we learn more about the Shah, the Ayatollah, and Persian culture than any book could have told us.
The film is an autobiographical story that follows Marjane as she grows from an impressionable and idealistic young girl to an outspoken young woman, all with the backdrop of an ever-changing Iran. At times her passion is as erratic as her fellow countrymen. In the beginning, she argues that the Shah, the Western sympathizing dictator of Iran was chosen by God and they should not protest him. After her parents explain to her that the Shah’s father was chosen by the British to be used as a puppet to access the nation’s oil, she marches around the house chanting “Down with the Shah!” The communal story of Iranian history becomes individual and therefore much more understandable. In an endearing way, young Marjane guides us through the chaos of the revolution and playfully mirrors the behaviors of the adults around her.
Things that may not be a part of a normal child’s life, seep into hers. We see the effects of torture on Marji. When she plays with her friends, they decide to go after the son of a Shah supporter and mastermind ways in which they can torture him until her mother intervenes. She even appears jealous when her friend’s father returns from being tortured by the Shah’s men. Why couldn’t her father have been a martyr for the cause? Still, Marjane is not an outlier in her society. She remains perplexed when adults around her also partake in her childish games.
A neighbor’s birthmark magically turns into a war wound after the fall of the Shah and the same teacher that told her the Shah was chosen by God, makes her students rip his photos out of their textbooks. The revolution turns everybody’s lives and beliefs on their heads. We see through her eyes that this is at times a land of backward ideology and inspiring movement. Her Uncle Anoosh is a communist revolutionary and her mother and grandmother go to demonstrations and stand up for their leftist beliefs at all times. This is a very different portrait of the women of Iran we usually see.
Marjane Satrapi’s vision of Iran is not a binary one and the same goes for her vision of the West. Much of the first part of the film could be read as an ode to Western culture. Marjane rarely consumes Iranian culture. She loves Bruce Lee and The Bee Gees, not Iranians. At times, it feels like Marjane resents her country. She hates growing up in a country that is so volatile. Why couldn’t she have grown up in a stable Western country and enjoyed their culture in peace? This changes abruptly when Marjane’s parents, frightened by the violent escalations, send her to Austria. For the first time in her life, the 13-year-old Marjane is completely on her own. She is away from all the violence of her city but isolated and scared in peaceful Vienna.
She immerses herself as much as she can in the culture of the city. Though, through humor as always, she shows us that there will always be aspects of Western culture she will never understand. As she says this the camera closes in on a cartoonish figure of an Austrian man in lederhosen as he yodels loudly and comically. The West is just as ridiculous as any other place. Still, Marjane’s attempts at fitting in cost her a vital part of herself. She becomes less enamored with the West when she experiences racism. Sometimes she can’t quite find the strength and humor to combat these kinds of comments. It gets so bad that she begins telling people that she is not Iranian but French. She has given herself up completely to the west and has lost herself in the process. It is only when the image of her grandmother telling her never to forget where she came from appears, that she finds the strength to tell off girls gossiping about her very obvious lie and says “I’m Iranian and proud of it!”.
Her absence from Iran proves to be nearly fatal. Maybe there aren’t bombs going off in Vienna but Marjane ends up without a home after a love affair gone bad. “A revolution had carried off part of my family. I had survived a war… but a banal love story nearly killed me.” She finally returns home after a period of intense loneliness but finds that her guilt at having left is overwhelming. How could the love affair leave her destitute when her friends from school had dodged bombs and lost loved ones? She learns from this guilt and embraces Iranian culture and life. She marries and goes to school but something is still missing. She will never be truly free in the country that she loves so much. The film ends with her back in the West but it is hardly a love affair. She finds a middle ground. Marjane is no longer a child. She sees her home country as incapable of changing in her lifetime but finds a way to love it anyway. She also sees the West as her only option, but it can never be her own.
We end in the airport, where this story began. Marjane says goodbye to her grandmother who reminds her again to never come back and to not lose track of who she is. In voice-over, Marjane says this is the last time she saw her grandmother, and “freedom has its price.” Marjane is a grown woman and clear-headed. The confusion and stereotyped view of Iran is no longer with the audience. We have also matured in this hour and a half. We understand this divisive country, the lure of the West, and most of all the necessity of never forgetting where you come from no matter how hard it is.
