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Movie of the Month

The film begins in an airport where Marjane Satrapi is unable to board a plane to Iran. Sitting and smoking a cigarette, she remembers her life as a girl in 1979 with Marji at the age of 10, a young girl with dreams of being a prophet and an emulator of Bruce Lee.

(The film is black and white during her memories). At this time, the general uprising against the US backed Shah of Iran begins and her middle class family participates with high hopes for a more just society. Meanwhile, Marji attempts to participate in her age's point of view whether it is threatening the child of an unpopular government official, or competing for the greater childish prestige of having a relative who has been a political prisoner the longest time such as her communist Uncle Anoosh.

Unfortunately, the hopes of the family are profoundly disappointed when Islamic Fundamentalists win the ensuing elections and force Iranian society into its own kind of repressive state, which ranges from forcing women to dress modestly including the Hijab, to rearresting and executing Anoosh for his political beliefs. Profoundly disillusioned, Marji rejects her prophetic aspirations and tries with her family to fit into the reality of the intolerant regime. Even as both the horrors of the Iran-Iraq war and blatant injustices occur such as an unqualified government appointed hospital administrator refusing to help a critically ill relative go abroad for medical treatment and thus precipitating his death, the family tries to find some solace in secret parties where they can enjoy simple pleasures the government has outlawed, such as alcohol. However as she grows up, Marji refuses to stay out of trouble, secretly buying Western heavy metal music on the black market, wearing unorthodox clothing such as a denim jacket, celebrating punk rock with a Michael Jackson button, or openly rebutting a teacher's lies about the abuses of the government.

Fearing her arrest for her outspokenness, Marji's parents send her to a school in Vienna, Austria where she could have safety and plenty. Unfortunately, Marji feels intolerably isolated in a foreign land surrounded by annoyingly superficial people who take their freedoms and peace for granted while making her feel ashamed of being Iranian. While in Austria, she starts to smoke Hashish. Her shame of being an Iranian culminates in a passionate love affair with a debonair native that traumatically ends on her eighteenth birthday when she discovers him cheating on her. Marji falls into a deep clinical depression that drives her into homelessness where she nearly dies of bronchitis before she is rescued off the streets. Eventually, Marji returns to Iran with her family's permission and hopes that the conclusion of the war would mean an improved life there. After her natural depression over the state of affairs in Iran is misdiagnosed as nervous breakdown (and given drugs that only deepen her ennui), she finds that Iranian society is more tyrannized than ever with atrocities like mass executions for political beliefs and petty religious absurdities and hypocrisies that make living as both an art student and a woman intolerable. At one point, Marji openly confronts the blatant sexist double standard in a school forum on public morality that singles out women. To cope, Marji resorts to personal survival tactics such as falsely accusing a man of making a pass at her to avoid being arrested for wearing make up (which disgusts her beloved grandmother for being so craven) and marrying her boyfriend over her mother's feminist objections to avoid scrutiny by the religious police. Eventually, as her marriage falls apart, things come to a head when a secret party is raided by the police which results in a friend being killed trying to escape.

After these incidents and her divorce that is encouraged by her grandmother, the family decides that Marji must leave the country again, and this time permanently, to avoid her being targeted by the authorities as a political dissident. Marji agrees, and her Grandmother dies soon after her departure. Back to present day, Marji once again is unable to return to Iran, and she takes a taxi from the airport. When the driver asks where she is from, she sighs, "Iran". Her final memory is of her grandmother telling her how she put jasmine in her brassiere to allow her to smell fresh every day.