Reading Peanuts in Tehran

[January 23rd, 2008]

Like the heroine of a Judy Blume novel, young Marjane Satrapi talks to God, bringing him complaints of personal trouble and the problems of the world. But in Persepolis , the animated memoir the Iranian cartoonist has grown up to make, God doesn’t just listen to Marjane—he talks back. Taking the form of a body-length river of white facial hair with kindly eyes, he dispenses gentle, avuncular advice in muffled French. And as Marjane grows older, and her troubles more acute, God is joined by another bearded man in the sky: Karl Marx. Together, they suggest that Marjane should stop feeling sorry for herself and buck up. “Remember,” calls Marx as the girl floats down to earth, “the struggle continues, right?” God shrugs. “Yeah,” he sighs. “The struggle continues.”

This depressed divinity is one of many reasons Persepolis won’t be showing in a theater near Marjane Satrapi’s hometown of Tehran anytime soon. But the scene also exemplifies the movie’s most disarming quality: the way it shrinks grand concepts to a personal scale. As sketched by Satrapi in her 2003 graphic novel and animated for the screen by her and co-director Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis manages to fit 16 years of Persian disaster into the perspective of a single girl. The movie’s black-and-white drawings recall sources from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to Picasso’s Guernica . But more than anything else, the movie—especially in its first act, filled with little round-headed kids—resembles Peanuts in a war zone.

Marjane, the Lucy Van Pelt of Tehran, is a precocious girl who in 1978 loves Bruce Lee movies and the bedtime stories of her Uncle Anoushe—who, following the deposition of the Shah, has returned from exile in the Soviet Union. (His tale of escape, which includes him poised, Byron-like on the rocks, preparing to swim toward onion domes, is among the most magical sequences in the film.) But the revolution is soon overtaken by angry men in beards and harsh women swallowed by their chadors, and by 1982 Marjane is sneaking through back alleys where black-market salesmen in trench coats offer bootleg cassettes of “Jichael Mackson.” Marjane buys an Iron Maiden tape, and as she returns home to blast “Master of Puppets,” the animation segues into a montage of boy soldiers charging into death in the Iran-Iraq War.

This transition is deft, but its power is muted slightly by the movie’s organization, which is even more episodic than the material requires, and bounds from one event to another without always giving the audience time to register the emotions. (Marjane’s wondrously acidic grandmother, the moral center of the movie, is the chief victim of the short attention span.) But the structural problems are more than offset by the scope, as a delicate balance of moods—irreverent yet tender, skeptical but hopeful—creates a reminder of what cartoons can do. Not simply what they can look like (the movie’s simple drawings are no match for the high-tech marvels of Pixar) but what kind of stories they can tell: They can bridge the fantastic and the ordinary, and can pull us close to places that previously seemed alien and hostile.

When Satrapi met with WW last year to promote her movie—she’ll be back April 7 to speak in Literary Arts’ Portland Arts&Lectures Series—she talked about just that storytelling capacity. “That was Tolstoy who said if you want to talk to the world, write about your small village,” she said. “Of course, you know, there is nothing more universal than one human being, one person.” In Persepolis , the story of a proud nation curdled by war and clerical oppression becomes a tale of one woman’s battle—not so much against the system as within herself, as she tries to maintain her personal compass in a country that would prefer she didn’t bother. The movie’s very existence proves she’s still fighting. The struggle continues.