Chicken with plums by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

Chicken with plums is based on Satrapi’s comic novel originally published in France in 2004. This work completes the author’s four-part graphic autobiographical series which became famous under the title, ’Persepolis’. The story of the current film takes place in Teheran around 1958, but it provides a look back even until the times of the great king, Solomon, and a look forward into the future. The narrator of the film is Azrael, the angel of death, who is waiting for the end of the deeply depressed Nasser Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric). During his last eight days, Nasser Ali takes the opportunity to remember the beauty and the dead ends of his own and his family members’ life as well. He lets us know the past and future fate of his children, and with him together, we discover the secret of his platonic love. The set of the film is part of Satrapi’s coherent world that was built from an indefinable nostalgia for a lost Iran (the country and a woman with the same name) and the fabulous old memories.

As for the style of the movie, it is not spared with the director’s harsh irony. Even if, being a live-action feature, it loses the chance to bravely play with the lines and contrasts in comparison to the animated structure of Persepolis, the excellent actors (Mathieu Amalric, Golshifteh Farahani, Chiara Mastroianni) can keep the message. In the end, Chicken with plums becomes a fine mixture of eastern symbolism and western satire, inspired by the felicity of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie.

Janka Barkoczi