'Persepolis' is her story of Iran from the inside

Marjane Satrapi says she's exhausted.

But the Iranian-born French graphic novelist and filmmaker must be hyperbolizing for effect: Her energy is disarming, her passion at times alarming.

Satrapi, 38, is on the phone from New York, where she is promoting the film adaptation of the graphic novel Persepolis, her memoir about growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Codirected by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis is a deeply moving, ravishing, black-and-white animated film by turns tragic and hilarious. (It opens Friday at Ritz theaters.)

Charming and enormously likable, Satrapi is liberal with cuss words, especially of the scatological sort. And though she has a healthy sense of humor about herself, she comes across as an irredeemable pessimist, so much so that she's been dubbed the "Princess of Darkness" by the London press.

"I just can't have any hope," she says when asked to assess the political future of her native land, or even that of her adopted homeland, France.

But for now, she's tired.

"When you do something like 55 interviews, you start to feel unreal," says Satrapi, who has also authored children's books, including Chicken With Plums and Monsters Are Afraid of the Moon. "Once in a while you have this feeling that you don't believe you are yourself."

She sounds frustrated, as if she can't quite enunciate what she's thinking. "It's as if I'm listening to someone else talking on the radio."

Self-identity, or more precisely the task of becoming an authentic individual, is a major preoccupation in Persepolis, which is such a delightful, compelling tale, it's easy to miss just how stealthily sophisticated it is.

Boldly inked in black and white, the memoir is a tour de force that made Satrapi an overnight sensation upon its publication in France in 2002. It has since been translated into 12 languages and has spawned a second volume, Persepolis 2.

The film, which draws from both books, has had its share of accolades, including a Special Jury Prize at Cannes, a New York Film Critics Circle award for best animated feature, and a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film.

Asked why she chose cartooning, Satrapi said, "when I think about anything, it's usually with images. . . . If you can draw and you can write, why choose one or the other?

"Anyway, that's the way humans first communicated - on cave walls."

Persepolis works on numerous levels: It's a psychologically astute story about a young woman who came of age in Iran during the turbulent years between 1978 and 1992.

It also provides an entertaining historical, sociological and political overview of the era, which included the Islamic revolution and Iran's disastrous 8-year war with Iraq.

The only child of well-educated, intellectual parents with Marxist leanings - her father was an engineer and her mother a clothing designer - Satrapi was 10 when she witnessed the cataclysmic revolution that replaced Iran's dictatorial king, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, with totalitarian Islamic fundamentalists.

Satrapi - who said she finds abhorrent the psychobabble approach to memoir-writing that seems to be popular in America - said she used her life story as a vehicle for telling the story of Iran.

"When I made the books, there was only one version of Iran" in the consciousness of the West, Satrapi said. "I wanted to tell the other version - the story of how it was for Iranians themselves."

She came face-to-face with the West's estimation of Iran in 1984, when she was sent to study at a high school in Vienna, Austria. She was shocked by how people reacted when they found out she was Iranian.

They treated her not just as an exotic other, but as a dangerous one. They were distrustful, wary, even a bit scared and hostile.

"Being Iranian has been considered evil for a very long time," Satrapi said. "It's such a stupid thing, labeling a country and a whole population 'evil,' but it takes hold of people and works on such a deep [unconscious] level."

During high school, Satrapi almost had a breakdown negotiating between her Iranian roots and the new, Westernized identity she cobbled together in Vienna. Finally, she had to accept that she was Iranian - Axis of Evil or not.

Satrapi, who lives in Paris with her husband of 12 years, said the language of good and evil provides rulers with a way to justify pursuing their own self-interest as if it were divinely sanctioned.

"Evil has always had an official place in our politics. One day it's the communists we label evil, the next it's Iranians," Satrapi said. "There's such a temptation to dehumanize people with labels. When other people are nothing but abstract notions, you forget they are the same as us."

The budding artist's four years in Vienna, which saw her go through puberty (the movie's treatment of her physical maturation is sidesplitting), ended disastrously. Having found and lost true love twice, a suicidal Satrapi ended up living on the streets and peddling drugs.

The sections about her return to Iran, where she studied art from 1988 to 1992 - when she finally left for France - are particularly depressing. They depict a young populace constantly harassed by AK-47-toting squads from the morality police, obsessed with enforcing moral and sexual purity.

Satrapi has not returned to her homeland in eight years, and says she never will. Curiously, perhaps, she refuses to share her opinion about the state of things in Iran.

"My feelings are so much mixed with melancholy and nostalgia, I don't trust myself to express them," she said.

"There's nowhere in the world today where I see hope," she said, entering that dark place she's famous for.

"I hate politics," she declares. "I was very passsionate about politics, until I started hating the politicians."

Politicians, she said, "have very easy, prepared answers to very complicated questions about life." Unlike the pols, Satrapi says her duty as an artist is to "ask complicated questions," even ones that may never admit of an answer.

She said she wants to use her art to "put people in a position to ask themselves the question, 'Why [should I] hate these people? Why are they supposed to be evil?' "

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