Leftist, Middle-Class . . . and Iranian: Growing up different, at home and abroad

The film "Persepolis," based on Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel about her early life in Iran, tells the story of a bright little girl growing up during the 1980s, but it is completely unlike any other coming-of-age story.  

Told through Satrapi's starkly beautiful black-and-white drawings brought to simple and elegant life, the story begins as the Shah is deposed in 1979. Marjane is about 10 years old, a devotee of Bruce Lee and Adidas, and curious about everything. Her parents, leftist intellectuals and comfortably middle class, explain to her how terrible life under the Shah's rule has been and express their hope that the revolution will lead to greater freedom and progress.  At first their hopes seem justified: Her beloved Uncle Anoush is released from prison, but it isn't long before the new Islamist regime, and then a devastating war with Iraq, bring much greater repression.    

  Marjane wears the veil forced on her, but refuses to submit in spirit. She passes notes in class (about subversive Western music like the Bee Gees; she later discovers punk), speaks heresy to her teachers, and talks back to the authorities. In one of the funniest and loveliest scenes, she begs some money from her mother and heads out to a Tehran street corner, where shadowy looking men are whispering the names of the contraband they are selling - not drugs, but smuggled tapes of Michael Jackson and Iron Maiden.

She is not the only one rebelling - behind closed doors, her parents and their friends take off their veils, listen to Western music, dance, smoke and drink alcohol, insisting on carrying on their lives as they did before, but in fear of the consequences if they are caught.

  Increasingly afraid for their outspoken daughter's safety, her parents finally send her away to live with friends in Vienna. She attends a French school and befriends a group of pretentious anarchists. She quickly forgets her wise grandmother's advice (remember who you are and where you came from) in order to fit in. The alienation she feels while abroad, in which she must forsake her identity to be free, acutely illustrates her dilemma.  (It's why her parents don't leave - they know they'd be forced to work as menials.) She loves and is loyal to Iran but can't be herself fully there either.  Despite this, after a few years in Vienna, a love affair gone bad and a run-in with a crazy landlady leave her homeless.  After she winds up in the hospital after passing out on a wintry street, she goes home to Iran. 

  At first she is dazed by the return to fundamentalist society, and spirals into deep depression. But she snaps herself out of it (after a pep talk from God, with whom she chats from time to time) and enrolls in university, still rebellious to the core. She still passes notes to her friends, speaks heresy to her teachers, and talks back to the authorities - only the stakes are higher now as an adult.

  Absurdities mount. In art class she is forced to draw models who are completely covered from head to toe (they don't learn much anatomy but get really good at drawing drapery). One day, running down the street to catch a bus, she is stopped by the police, who admonish her not to run in public as it makes her rear end move obscenely.

"Then stop staring at my ass!" she screams back.

  While politics shapes Marjane's life and experiences, "Persepolis" isn't an explicitly political movie, except inasmuch as Satrapi wishes to show that Iranians cannot be defined by the few extremists seen on Western TV.  She paints, literally, a portrait of a lively and modern society, hidden under a veil but still waiting to burst free.

  "Persepolis" is rated PG-13 for violent images, sexual references, language and brief drug content. It opens Friday at the Triplex in Great Barrington, MA, and the following week at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY.