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Persepolis is the film version of Marjane Satrapi's graphic autobiographical novel (i.e. comic book) of the same name. It tells the story of Marjane and her middle class leftist family, from the overthrow of the Shah, through the heady days of the “February Revolution” of 1979 (1) and the creation of the Islamic Republic, to the Iran-Iraq war, and Marjane's subsequent self-imposed exile in Europe.
Marjane is a wilful and adventurous child who displays a passionate loathing of injustice from an early age. Her Uncle Anoush, who we assume is a member of the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, becomes an important influence on her after he is released from the Shah's prisons. The euphoria of the early post-Shah days with its mass movements, begins to be replaced with a growing concern over the rise of the Islamists. Yet Uncle Anoush remains optimistic and comments that the Islamists are not as bad as the Shah. This represents the position of the Tudeh, which supported the Islamists, only to be imprisoned, murdered or forced to publicly embrace Islam later on. Sadly, this is also the fate of Uncle Anoush who is re-arrested, imprisoned and murdered by the Islamic Republic. And he is not alone, we also see a young “communist” woman arrested and executed for her political views, sharing the fate of thousands of political activists at the time.
Islamic Republic - Lesser Evil?
In its review of the film, Socialist Worker (2) says that "Persepolis gives a narrow and inaccurate portrayal of Iran's history". True, Marjane's perspective is a relatively privileged one, but there is more history and politics in this film than in any crass leftist agitprop the SWP would approve of, and the portrayal of the utter uselessness for the working class of the traditional Stalinist party, the Tudeh, is just one example.
In chillingly Orwellian fashion the Iran-Iraq war begins without any clear reason, only to end eight years and over one million deaths later with no gain for either side. The Socialist Worker review says that the film lacks any political analysis of the war because;
the harsh reality of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran is barely discussed and instead the film focuses on the repression used by the Iranian government during this time.
This is plain wrong; the film shows at some length the consequences of the war for civilians in Tehran who experience food shortages and bombing raids. The fault of the film in the eyes of the Socialist Worker reviewer is that it lacks the SWP's political analysis of the war in that it shows the vicious repression of the wartime Iranian state, rather than showing the Iranian war effort as a valiant anti-imperialist struggle against Western-backed Iraq. Like all Trotskyists, the SWP need to support the "lesser imperialist side" so the suggestion in the film that the "roles played by Iran and Iraq were equally bad" is anathema to the Trotskyist world view. The reality is that both sides were equally reactionary and, although the war was started by Saddam Hussein's Iraq (with a lot of financial encouragement and dodgy intelligence from the CIA), it served the Iranian regime well, by enabling it to ramp up internal repression and channel discontent into patriotic support for the war effort. (3) The war enabled the Islamic regime to consolidate its power in a way that would have not been possible had it not occurred. The Trotskyist supporters of the "lesser evil" theory are always blind to the fate of the working class in the regime they choose to support. Working class internationalism is the only real alternative to all imperialist regimes, big or small.
An Accurate View of Iran Today
As the Islamic repression continues Marjane's rebellious nature leads her parents to fear for her safety and they arrange for her to go to Vienna to study. In Vienna she is beset by instability and insecurity, moving around from one temporary accommodation to another and experiencing low level racism. She is quietly contemptuous of the smug nihilism of her affluent middle class student friends and their petulant rejection of consumerism without having any other vision. Reaching rock bottom she returns to Iran suffering from clinical depression. However here she encounters the tyranny of the religious police and the Islamicisation of the university she has enrolled in. A misfit in her homeland she plans another escape to Europe.
Persepolis is not an overtly political film but it contains a plethora of insights into recent Iranian history. As an entertainment event, the narrative is well paced and the dialogue is sharp, witty, and sometimes deeply moving without descending into sentimentality. The stylised yet simple black and white animation is stunning and gives the film a strange beauty.
The SWP criticise Persepolis for giving "a pessimistic view of Iranian society" and for failing to dispel the idea of Iran as "a brutal medieval theocracy". Given that there is little to be optimistic about in Iran and that it is a brutal theocracy, (OK, perhaps not a medieval one) Persepolis is all the better for that.
PBD(1) For our analysis of this event see Twenty Years of the Ayatollahs in Iran in Revolutionary Perspectives 13. £3 including postage from our London address
(2) Socialist Worker 2098, 26th April 2008
(3) For more on the conditions inside Iran and its role in the inter-imperialist set-up see: The Hopelessness of Reform and the Capitalist Nature of the Islamic Republic in Revolutionary Perspectives 32, _US and Iran - Two Faces of Capitalist Barbar_ism in Revolutionary Perspectives 35, Imperialist Aspirations Mask Economic Decline in Revolutionary Perspectives 42 and Turkey, Pakistan and Iran: Squaring the Circle of US Imperialism in Revolutionary Perspectives 44
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