Evolution in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’ and ‘Chicken With Plums’

In a similar way to Marji (‘Persepolis’), Nasser (‘Chicken with Plums’) must be sent far away to have his journey of becoming. There is something in him — talent — that requires he must go beyond his home. But whereas in Marji’s case she must go away to protect herself, Nasser must go away so he can grow, get bigger and fuller and richer.

Persepolis

Written by Colleen Clemens as part of our theme week on Women Directors.


I have been teaching Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel and film Persepolis for years. I love introducing the young Marji to my students and giving them the opportunity to think about how growing up in Iran may actually share many elements of growing up in the U.S.: jeans, boy troubles, music your parents cannot stand, coming to terms with one’s body.

I was eager to see Satrapi’s second film (co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud): a non-animated work, Chicken with Plums, also based on a graphic novel. In the film, the main character, Nasser Ali, is dying. The film counts down the last days of his life and relies on flashbacks to help the viewer understand why Ali is choosing to starve himself to death.

I sat in the dark theater on the last night of the week’s run at the local art house cinema and took notes. But I didn’t leave feeling like I had connected with the film; I didn’t feel like the film offered as much to think about as I had first thought.

And then I realized why I had felt funny about the second film: that in it, he is becoming something — an artist — while the first film deals only with becoming a woman.

There are several reasons why I think it is fair to compare the films even though they look so different. Satrapi wrote both screenplays both based on her graphic novels. Both films deal with a protagonist who is fighting for survival — in the case of Persepolis, how to survive as a woman in an autocratic theocracy and coming of age in a country not of one’s origin and away from one’s family — and the story of Nasser Ali who is spending the entire film dying because he has lost his art because his jealous wife destroyed his violin, the one given to him by his master, whom we will meet later.

In an interview with Mother Jones, Satrapi was asked how she relates to this male protagonist. She replied:

“As soon as I draw a female, I know everybody is going to relate it to me. So even unconsciously there are things that I won’t say. When I create a male character, they wouldn’t know it’s me, so I could just say much more.”

I am interested in the fact that Satrapi finds the freedom to use a male character to investigate becoming something, in this case an artist, a freedom she does not feel when writing a female character that will be conflated with her own self. To summarize this ease, Satrapi told French Culture:

“I said that his hurt musician was the character who was closest to me; because, as he’s a man, I can hide behind me much more easily.”

In an effort to investigate these two main characters, both of which Satrapi admits are autobiographical, we can look more closely at the scenes that deal directly with the main characters coming of age with the guidance of a mentor, in the case of Marji her grandmother, and Nasser Ali, his mentor Agha Mozaffar.

Marji has a close bond with her grandmother, a woman whom has seen her share of revolutions and pain, as members of her family were jailed and killed. She is a tough character who laughs when Marji announces later in the film that she will be getting a divorce and who scolds Marji for using her gender as protection and selling out an innocent man. The two key scenes with the grandmother come at moments where Marji is on the cusp of change. The first is the night Marji is about to leave. A young girl about to go through puberty, Marji is sent to Europe by her parents out of fear for their bright and resistant daughter. In this scene, Marji is spending her last night in Iran with her grandmother.

persepolis-jasmine-bra

She has to leave Iran to learn what she is to learn in the film: how to become a woman. Marji’s lesson is focused on maintaining her breasts, a signifier of her femininity. Most of what Marji is to learn in this film deals with her gender and her body’s relation to her gender.

The second scene is when the film is ending. Marji has left Iran for good. She is never to return upon her mother’s orders. The last scene hearkens back to the first scene I showed in which Marji learns about her grandmother’s trick to preserve her breasts. We know that the grandmother has died, that she will no longer be there to teach Marji more lessons about being a woman.  The film ends with the same flowers drifting imagery, closing the film with a reminder of the grandmother’s femininity.

The grandmother character is used to usher Marji into womanhood. There is no mention of what Marji will do when she is older, just that she will be a woman. Here are several lessons that Marji learns about being a woman: through the story of Nilofaur, Marji learns about sexual violence; through two boyfriends, she learns about sexuality; and through her mother, Marji learns that in order to find freedom as a woman, she cannot stay in Iran. The film spends a great deal of its energy showing how challenging it is for Marji to become a woman, be that an independent woman, but still we don’t see Marji creating anything or doing anything in this bildungsroman.

In contrast we have Nasser Ali, whose gender is also an impediment, but only in that women try to get in the way of him being what he is meant to be: an artist. His mother wants him to settle down and his wife destroys his violin. This film also features a mentorship relationship: that of Nasser with Agha.

In a similar way to Marji, Nasser must be sent far away to have his journey of becoming. There is something in him — talent — that requires he must go beyond his home. But whereas in Marji’s case she must go away to protect herself, Nasser must go away so he can grow, get bigger and fuller and richer.

In the first scene, Nasser meets withs Agha Mozaffa in the faraway place that one must have to work to get to. Even the depiction of this place is mystical, magical, not for everyone. As a young man — and one who’s becoming a man is not a focus of the film — he goes to come of age by learning about love and art.

In the final scene, Nasser comes of age as an artist because he had learned about losing love. In this scene, he will get the tool that he will use to be an artist, just as Marji was given the flower trick by her grandmother, the image that ends the film. Again, the mentor is no longer of use to the student: the lesson is complete and now the character can go out into the world.

But there’s a difference between the world Marji enters and the world Nasser enters: the latter is off to jetset as an acclaimed artist. Marji is in the confines of a cab in the place she doesn’t want to be. She does claim to be from Iran at the end, which in a film about conflicts about identity matters greatly, but she is Iranian and a woman. She is not an artist (though we know that she does become a great one).

I love both of these films for different reasons, but I am concerned that in looking at them as major elements of Satrapi’s body of film work that they mirror the idea Kingsley Browne on The Daily Show stated: “Girls become women by getting older, boys become men by accomplishing something.” Watching Nasser become an artist is satisfying in a way that I don’t necessarily feel when watching Persepolis, even if I do love the work that film does to show the difficulty of forming one’s gender and national identity.


Colleen Clemens is a Bitch Flicks staff writer and assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

‘Boyhood’ (Feat. Girlhood)

Let’s face it, ‘Boyhood’ is a gimmick movie. Richard Linklater sporadically filmed it over a twelve-year period so we could see the child actors in it actually grow-up. If you loved Michael Apted’s ‘Up’ series but wanted more fiction and less wait, Boyhood is for you. But if you just love coming-of-age dramas, I’m not sure I can recommend this one.

Ellar Coltrane as Mason at the beginning of 'Boyhood'
Ellar Coltrane as Mason at the beginning of Boyhood

 

Let’s face it, Boyhood is a gimmick movie. Richard Linklater sporadically filmed it over a 12-year period so we could see the child actors in it actually grow up. If you loved Michael Apted’s Up series but wanted more fiction and less wait, Boyhood is for you. But if you just love coming-of-age dramas, I’m not sure I can recommend this one.

The child actors (Ellar Coltrane as central character Mason and the director’s daughter, Lorelai Linklater, as Mason’s sister, Samantha) are extremely natural and sufficiently likable. Patricia Arquette is fantastic as their mother, who faces a roller coaster of personal, professional, and economic ups and downs. And Ethan Hawke plays their intermittently available father as Ethan-Hawke-in-a-Richard-Linklater-movie, that is, opinionated and rambling and just-barely functioning as an adult human being, but I happen to like that character a lot.

Mason and Samantha's mother (Patricia Arquette) reads them a Harry Potter book
Mason and Samantha’s mother (Patricia Arquette) reads them a Harry Potter book

 

As strong as their performances are, the problem is that Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are recognizable movie stars, in stark contrast with the kids at the center of the film and the unknown Texan character actors in the supporting cast. This evaporates the faux-documentary feeling of Boyhood, and leaves in its place an overlong, meandering, plain-old movie.

What’s left is essentially the non-dinosaur, non-Sean Penn-on-limbo-beach parts of The Tree of Life, with fewer shots of light shining through trees, and nostalgia from the last decade instead of the 1950s.  Six-year-old Mason rides his bike in endless loops around his block. Eight-year-old Mason plays Wii boxing. Twelve-year-old Mason finds out about internet porn. Fifteen-year-old Mason smokes weed and gets an earring. Seventeen-year-old Mason has sex with his girlfriend in his sister’s dorm room. Eighteen-year-old Mason wins a photography scholarship and does shrooms in the mountains and we can finally, FINALLY leave the theater. (Boyhood is two hours and 45 minutes long, with exactly zero explosions or giant robot fights. I do not have the patience for such things.)

Mason and his sister Samantha (Lorelai Linklater)
Mason and his sister Samantha (Lorelai Linklater)

 

It is possible I lost interest because I never had a boyhood of my own. I kept wanted to see more of Samantha, because I could relate to her girlhood (my favorite scene in the movie was Samantha cringing through The Sex Talk with her dad at a bowling alley) and get my nostalgia kick. I was also more interested in Patricia Arquette’s mother character and her struggles because I could relate to them as an adult and as someone who plans to have children.

 

Sullen teenage Mason and his father (Ethan Hawke)
Sullen teenage Mason and his father (Ethan Hawke)

I may be placing too much importance on gender here, because there are loads of non-gendered experiences of childhood present in this movie. I played with dirt and found out my parents aren’t perfect and rejected authority figures and aggressively sulked, just like Mason. Maybe if Samantha and the mother hadn’t been there, just out of focus, I would have related more to his journey instead of yearning for more from the sidelined female characters.

And as I got bored with Boyhood, I got distracted by the logistics of its gimmick. The passage of time is largely expressed through changed hairstyles on the kids, and I wondered if that was mandated by the director (would Richard Linklater really make his daughter get a regrettable purple-red dye job? (ETA: he did not.) I morbidly wondered what kind of insurance they took out on the lives of the central actors and how they would have reacted to an untimely death. I tried to remember what year the songs on the soundtrack came out so I could figure out how much longer I had to wait to get out of there (I have never been so excited to hear that Gotye song. I turned to my viewing partner and whispered “only two years left!!”).

Eighteen-year-old Mason at the end of the film
Eighteen-year-old Mason at the end of the film

Boyhood is a gimmick movie, but admittedly, the gimmick is pretty cool. If you don’t mind long runtimes and have a strong way to relate to this disjointed series of vignettes (having had a boyhood of your own, having a son around the age of the kids in the movie, growing up in Texas), you may well love Boyhood. I didn’t hate it. I just wanted to see more of the women in, it and have it be over an hour earlier.  My own childhood felt shorter.


Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who still plays with sticks in the dirt.

Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks

Something about summer always makes me nostalgic. I think it’s that when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, it all seems so significant. You tend to measure time in summers, those long unstructured months that melt together in your own dream world where your parents have no authority. How many coming of age stories begin with something akin to “It was the summer I turned 16”? In honor of the summer months, I thought I’d take a look at some underrated coming of age films and what I learned from them.

Something about summer always makes me nostalgic.

Remember riding your bike around town?  Remember waiting at the ice cream truck, or trying on new looks in front of the mirror, driving aimlessly around with a new license, or just listening to music in your room alone and having multiple epiphanies? ‘Tis the season to come of age. To be forever changed.

I think it’s that when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, it all seems so significant. You tend to measure time in summers, those long unstructured months that melt together in your own dream world where your parents have no authority.  How many coming of age stories begin with something akin to “It was the summer I turned 16”?

In honor of the summer months, I thought I’d take a look at some underrated coming of age films and what I learned from them.

 

Vivian feels her large breasts make her “practically deformed” and is very uncomfortable with them
Vivian feels her large breasts make her “practically deformed” and is very uncomfortable with them.

 

Slums of Beverly Hills

Like many coming of age classics, Slums of Beverly Hills is both semi-autobiographical (for writer-director Tamara Jenkins) and set in the recent past. 90s indie darling Natasha Lyonne plays Vivian Abromowitz, a girl struggling with her dysfunctional family, burgeoning sexuality and uncomfortably large breasts (an unusual teenage girl problem in a genre full of girls praying for big boobs), all while constantly moving between seedy apartments in Beverly Hills as part of her father’s plan to allow her and her brothers to attend prestigious schools. Through the course of the film, Vivian not only has her period and loses her virginity, clear markers of ascent into womanhood, but also realizes sex can be pleasurable and she has a right to demand that it is. She also comes to appreciate her eccentric father (Alan Arkin) for the sacrifices he makes to give his children the best futures possible.

Lesson: Learn to be amused, not afflicted. Practice saying, one day this will all go in my memoir.

 

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael


Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, like Heathers, Beetlejuice, and Mermaids, stars Winona Ryder back when she was the patron saint of “weird girls” who liked to wear black and didn’t talk much in class. Her unfortunately named character, Dinky, is a social outcast who prefers animals to her peers, who constantly taunt and torture her and disappoints her adoptive mother by rejecting feminine clothing. Though sometimes its hard to figure out whether Dinky is ostracized for being antisocial or has learned to be antisocial after years of being ostracized. Stuck in a quirky indie film style town where the childhood home of minor celebrity, Roxy Carmichael, is preserved as a museum, Dinky sets out to validate her existence by proving she is Roxy’s long lost daughter.

Lesson: You can’t develop in a vacuum. Spending time alone is valuable, but you really learn who you are from living in the world you have and getting to know the people around you, not from escaping into the world you wish you had.

 

Lisa’s whole understanding of the world is changed when she watches a woman die in her arms and knows she is partially responsible
Lisa’s whole understanding of the world is changed when she watches a woman die in her arms and knows she is partially responsible.

 

Margaret


Despite hitting some familiar beats (loss of virginity, teacher-student relationship, first encounter with death), Margaret is a very different type of coming of age story, and to my mind, a truer one, than I’ve seen before. As it begins, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), a privileged Manhattan teenager, is just coming into her own. She has new and serious opinions about war and politics and passionately argues them in class and charges around the city casually flirting and testing out her new power. When she distracts a bus driver, contributing to a fatal accident, her grief and guilt lead her to seek the driver’s dismissal, which she feels is the only fair consequence. Here, Lisa shows how young she still is, as she doggedly seeks fairness, blind to the interests of the other parties involved and to any other option. She still sees the world as one where the guilty are always punished and the innocent rewarded, and in the moment where she learns things will not work the ways she imagined, she breaks down into a child-like tantrum.

Lesson: Life isn’t fair, it’s really not fair and sometimes there is nothing you can do to make things right.

 

Dirty Girl


Danielle Edmundson (Juno Temple) thinks God made her purely for sex. Known as the “Dirty Girl” at school for her promiscuity, Danielle looks down on the girls in her class who fuss over their appearance and wish for their Prince Charmings, and uses the boys to prove to herself she has a talent. In Clark (Jeremy Dozier), a shy, gay boy who also sticks out like a sore thumb in their 1980s Oklahoma town, she finds a kindred spirit and the two hit the road, ostensibly to find Danielle’s father, but really to find themselves. Neither Clark nor Danielle have it all figured out. At first she’s the cooler-than-thou mentor who ups his confidence, but in the last moments he’s the one who helps her figure out who she wants to be. Refreshingly, the narrative doesn’t suggest Danielle’s sexual experience is wrong or that she needs to be celibate, but that it’s not the only thing she has or only way people should define her.

Lesson: The people you want in your life are the people who like you for who you are–the people that encourage you to be yourself, but only the best version of yourself.

Danielle appraises her peers and dislikes what she sees.
Danielle appraises her peers and dislikes what she sees.

 

Haunter


Most teenagers feel bored and trapped at some point, in their small towns or in their families. Haunter twists teenage alienation into a ghost story centered around Lisa Johnson (Abigail Breslin), another 80s teen, the only person in her family who realizes they’re dead. I chose to read Haunter as coming of age story, despite the fact that the central character will never get any older because it’s all about what Lisa learns. She becomes responsible for her family as the only one that knows the truth and her world becomes a nightmare none of them are aware of, as she is tormented by an murderous spirit. Unlike most alienated teenage girls she also finds herself through taking on the mission of trying to save the family currently living in the house from being the murderer’s next victims. And Lisa also grows in the expected ways for a coming of age heroine, as she goes from blaming her parents for their weaknesses and feeling superior, to allowing herself to understand, and walk in their shoes.

Lesson:  Some of your angsty feelings are legitimate, some are self-indulgent. It’s a great skill to know the difference.

 

Lisa’s clarinet practice fills her time as she remains stuck in her house, the same day repeating endlessly
Lisa’s clarinet practice fills her time as she remains stuck in her house, the same day repeating endlessly.

 

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.