Graphic Details

Marjane Satrapi traces the development of Persepolis from comic book to movie.

by Sam Adams

LIGHTIN' UP: "If you are too serious, you don't understand that life is too short and you are going to die." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Opening at the dawn of Iran's Islamic revolution, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis covers a dark period in the country's history and her life. Only 9 when the Shah is deposed, young Marjane is old enough to glean what's happening, but too young to understand its import. She overhears whispers about family friends killed protesting in the street, concocts a heroic past for her imprisoned uncle and spies an arm protruding from the rubble of a house that has been blasted to bits by an Iraqi missile.

But Persepolis is also filled with moments of great humor, and the sense of an indomitable personality that has survived attempts at repression, perhaps even been strengthened by them. Rarely has it seemed so appropriate to speak of an author's voice. Every page, every panel of Satrapi's two-volume graphic novel, exudes a palpable sense of the woman behind the page.

Not every author lives up to her fictionalized self, but Satrapi surpasses it. In person, she is funnier, more forceful and substantially more profane. Her temper shortened by a day of interviews, she speaks without hesitation, almost without breath — pausing only to hand a lighter to her co-director, Vincent Paronnaud.

The process of turning her comic book into a movie was not easy. Satrapi knew she wanted to maintain the look of the comic, which meant employing a black-and-white, two-dimensional style that could not be more at odds with the vogue for hyperrealist digital animation. The movie is not ostentatious in its departures, but it is hard to think of anything else like it.

"We knew what we didn't want, but we absolutely didn't know what we wanted," Satrapi recalls. "We didn't have any reference. We couldn't say to people, 'What do you think about Disney or Tex Avery or Miyazaki?' I love them all, but that was not what we wanted."

Working with Paronnaud and most of the hand-drawing animators in France, Satrapi developed a visual plan that uses the comic as a reference point without being slavishly wedded to it. The figures, she found, needed to become more naturalistic in order to move, and the backgrounds, more detailed. Additional styles added variety: In historical flashbacks, the characters appear as paper puppets, and incidents Marjane heard about but did not witness are recounted in silhouette, like the death of a young man who falls from a rooftop while fleeing the police.

The silhouette sequences also introduce a critical degree of restraint; though Satrapi does not shy away from depicting violence, she does so elliptically. "Showing too much of misery and going too much toward sensationalism and miserabilism, for me that is pornography," she says.

Instead, Satrapi leavens her darkest tales with lighter moments. "Humor," she says, "is a question of intelligence. If you are too serious, that only means that you don't understand that life is too short and you are going to die. Which means that you are so stupid. People that are too serious and they don't have any sense of humor, to me they are stupid people."

For Satrapi, context is key. She has described Persepolis, originally published in a French newspaper, as an explicitly pedagogical work designed to present an alternate view of Iranian society to the West. The title comes from the capital of ancient Persia, a way of pointing out that Iran's history goes back thousands of years, and neither the country nor its people should be reduced to the last three decades.

As caustic as Satrapi can be, she reveals herself as a bleeding-heart humanist when she discusses the universal understanding she hopes her comics, and her animation, promote. "When you make live action, from the moment you put it in a geographical place, it becomes again this story of this other one that is so far from us, that we don't understand. There's something abstract about the drawing. It is a very international language. Before human beings were writing, they were drawing. When you draw a happy face, you don't have some culture in which they say, 'Oh, this guy is crying.' It doesn't exist. It's something that everyone can identify."

To date, Satrapi's comics have sold more than a million copies worldwide, and Persepolis the movie was selected as France's official submission for the foreign-language Oscar, beating out the presumed favorite, La Vie en Rose.

"For me," she says, "laughing with somebody is the height of understanding. You have to be able to understand the spirit of somebody to be able to laugh with him."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Persepolis opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse. See Shaun Brady's review on p. 31.