Chicken With Plums

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  • Opened August 31, 2012 (NY, LA)
  • 1 hr 31 min
  • PG-13 | Violent Images, Sensuality, Some Drug Content and Smoking

  • Teheran, 1958. Since his beloved violin was broken, Nasser Ali Khan, one of the most renowned musicians of his day, has lost all taste for life. Finding no instrument worthy of replacing it, he decides to confine himself to bed to await death. As he hopes for its arrival, he plunges into deep reveries, with dreams as melancholic as they are joyous, taking him back to his youth and even to a conversation with Azrael, the Angel of Death, who reveals the future of his children... As pieces of the puzzle gradually fit together, the poignant secret of his life comes to light: a wonderful story of love that inspired his genius and his music.
    Note: Film is presented in French with English subtitles. Full synopsis

  • Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Edouard Baer, Maria de Medeiros, Golshifteh Farahani, Eric Caravaca
  • Director: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud
  • Genres: Art House/Foreign, Drama

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Critic Reviews

100
Chicago Sun-Times
| Roger Ebert

A grand, romantic life story about love, loss, regret and the sadness that can be evoked by a violin - not only through music, but through the instrument itself. It is all melancholy and loss, and delightfully comedic, with enough but not too much magic realism. The story as it stands could be the scenario for an opera. Read full review

88
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
| Joe Williams

Although the story is mournful, the movie is buoyed by a heaven-scented surrealism. Read full review

83
Entertainment Weekly
| Lisa Schwarzbaum

Adapting Satrapi's graphic novel about a violinist (Mathieu Amalric) in late-1950s Tehran who's got a broken fiddle and a broken heart and takes to his bed, willing himself to die, the filmmakers rely on expressive eyes to carry a narrative style suitable for a silent movie. Read full review

80
The Hollywood Reporter
|

Both winsome and sophisticated, Chicken with Plums unfolds like a rich Persian carpet woven of memories and nostalgia in a colorful fantasy Iran of 1958, twenty years before the Islamic Revolution turned the country to somber grays. Read full review

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Mathieu Amalric as Nasser Ali in "Chicken With Plums."