Over the past couple of days, a kerfuffle’s been unfolding in the Chicago Public Schools after the administration announced that Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir Persepolis would be removed from seventh-grade classrooms, due to concerns about the language and content, apparently in particular, the book’s portrayal of torture during the Iranian Revolution. It’s not clear to me that a specific parent complaint prompted the book’s being pulled from the curriculum, but it’s still a disappointing decision, given how wonderfully attuned Persepolis is to the inner lives of children and teenagers, particularly teenage girls. And as the decision’s become a political football between the school administration and the Chicago Teacher’s Union, it’s also become a test case in how to handle changes to curriculum poorly, in a way that shows a lack of respect both for students and for strong material itself.

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public School system wrote in a letter to principals in her system that: “We have determined Persepolis may be appropriate for junior and senior students and those in Advance Placement classes. Due to the powerful images of torture in the book, I have asked our Office of Teaching & Learning to develop professional development guidelines, so that teachers can be trained to present this strong, but important content. We are also considering whether the book should be included, after appropriate teacher training, in the curriculum of eighth through tenth grades. Once this curricular determination has been made, we will notify you.” It’s unclear why the school system couldn’t have made this determination over the summer, rather than in the middle of the year, so that the decision would be consistent over a year of students in the system.

I don’t necessarily think it’s the worst thing in the world to determine that a work can be more fully absorbed by students who are both older, and who have been better-prepared for certain material by other parts of the curriculum, whether it’s history, geography, or other literature. But that determination should be made based on those concerns, and announced in a way that is reflective of a concern about the overall efficacy of curriculum design. Pulling the book from the rotation mid-year can’t help but look like the decision is in response to a parent complaint, rather than a genuine reassessment of how best to present a work that the school system continues to think is important and is committed to presenting in a way that will be to the book’s best advantage as well as to its students’. This seems like it would have been particularly important given that, as the Chicago Teacher’s Union points out, many elementary schools in the system don’t have libraries, so removing Persepolis from the classroom is effectively removing student access to the book, at least in a school setting.

It’s also easy in cases like these to appear that you’re showing a lack of respect for what students can handle. The portrayals of torture in Persepolis aren’t exceptionally graphic. They are, like everything else in the book, in black and white, in fairly simple outlines. Gashes from a beating don’t suppurate—they stand out in sharp relief. The way the pain of them is communicated is through the main character’s reaction. The experience of reading Persepolis as a child or teenager is the experience of seeing the impact of torture on someone very like yourself, who likes punk music, and gets angry at God, and alternately adores and fights with her parents. It’s a book that trusts teenagers to handle the idea of torture and the concept of war because its author had to handle those things not just in practice, but in reality, when her relatives were tortured and her friends’ older siblings were sent off to die in war with keys to paradise around their necks. Believing that children shouldn’t experience those things for real shouldn’t be the same thing as believing that they can’t being trusted to experience the sadness, fear, and anger that will help them navigate the world as moral adults. A school system that’s afraid of its ability to handle introducing students to these kind of emotions or ideas is one that doesn’t seem to trust its teachers or itself very much.

I recently had a chance to attend a screening of Chicken With Plums, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s adaptation of her graphic novel of the same name about a violinist, Nasser-Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric), who makes the decision to give up on life. The movie itself is a wild ride through pre-revolutionary Iran, legendary Persia and the United States in a mix of live action and animation. And Satrapi’s talk after the screening was almost as wide-ranging, touching on her cinematic influences, getting audiences to relate to Iranian characters, and the value of reading her work for its politics, as well as her glimpses into the human heart.

Satrapi called back to an older tradition in discussing the multi-cultural nature of her movies, in which French actress Chiara Mastroianni has been a stand-in for Iranian Satrapi. “Cultures, they have so much influence on each other. You don’t get to the border and one culture stops and another begins. They are rings of the same tree,” she said. “You have an Iranian story, you shoot it in Berlin, it’s in French, and you present it in America…You had a man like [Ernst] Lubitsch, he made a set, called it Prague, and had Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper and they were Czech.” And she noted that while she and Paronnaud love European movies, “We also love American sitcoms because they were all over the world. Who’s The Boss was the impetus for us to make the sitcom section,” of Chicken With Plums, which follows Nasser’s son on a his picaresque immigration to the United States.

Satrapi said that one of the challenges in making Chicken With Plums was how quickly expectations for what she, as a graphic novelist, would do in movies became set. “Once you have made an animation movie that works, they want you to make another animated movie with the same subject,” she said. But she said that the tradition of underground art, where she and Paronnaud began their careers, gave them and their collaborators the advantage of low expectations. They, and the composer who wrote the original score for Chicken With Plums were less worried about making money than about making the work that was important to them.

It was an attitude that also served her well in making Persepolis. Satrapi said she’d been reluctant to pursue an adaptation because of their shaky track record, until a friend told her, she said, “Are you crazy? People are going to give you a couple million Euro…The worst thing that can happen is you make the worst movie in the world.” Even then, she was rigorous about what she wanted, reasoning that she wouldn’t make the movie if her conditions, including hand-drawn animation and casting Catherine Deneuve to voice her mother, weren’t met. Satrapi said it was important to her to make that movie with hand-drawn animation because “The abstraction of the drawing is something that let us tell a unique story, because anyone can relate,” but that because Chicken With Plums is a sweeping romance rather than a historically-engaged memoir, “This was a universal love story, so we didn’t need that.”

The movie traces the source of Nasser’s dissatisfaction back to the love of his youth, with a young woman named Irâne whose father refused to allow her to marry a musician without prospects. That journey back in time makes clear that Nasser’s brokenness is not simply a character trait, but the result of a profound disappointment that damaged his ability to connect with other people. To be nasty and bad cannot only be the privilege of nasty and bad people. Everyone has the right to be nasty and bad once in a while. His wife Faringuisse (Maria de Medeiros), “she’s like a maniac at the beginning but little by little, we see hear beauty and learn her cause and we come to love her,” Satrapi said.

And while Chicken With Plums is a story of doomed romances, Satrapi made it clear that she welcomes a political reading of Irâne, whose name stands in for her country, and whose rejection of Nasser inspires him to travel the world as a musician, bringing bits of his nation with him in a parallel of the diaspora that sent Iranians, including Satrapi, all over the world. “The story happens in 50 years. There was a coup d’etat that destroyed the dream of democracy, not just in Iran, but in the whole region, and the result is the situation you are living now,” she said. “It’s symbolic but it is something that is underneath. If you understand it, better. If not, it is a beautiful love story.”

I joked a couple of weeks ago that I wanted a Persepolis video game. Instead, I’m having to settle for a live-action adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken With Plums that has an odd whiff of Roberto Benigni about it, at least in the trailer:

I thought the Persepolis adaptation was both an excellent condensation of Satrapi’s story and a translation of her cartoons into animation, and I’ll admit to wanting more of this. If she’s inclined to do that again, I’d really love to see someone adapt Embroideries, her hilarious book about the sex lives of an intergenerational group of women. I don’t know that a movie could take the exact form of the novel, which is rather conversational, but it’s a lovely book that puts the kind of mainstream sexual and romantic topics that are the subject of American women’s movies on a continuum with issues like arranged marriages and restored virginity. The idea that everyone has the exactly same concerns around the world is silly. But illustrating the commonalities is useful, and makes it easier to absorb the differences.