However colourful these days are made by dreams of Nasser’s past, present and future, many of them presented in seductive hyper-real or animated insets, they never really awaken our interest in a story whose end is revealed at the beginning, or a main character whose selfish gesture is never quite made okay by the fertility of his imagination. We watch him do so over the following eight days. Life no longer holds any meaning for him, and he is determined simply to pine away until he dies. One day in 1958, Nasser Ali Khan (Amalric), a talented Iranian violinist, decides to take to his bed in the Tehran apartment that he shares with his schoolteacher wife Faringuisse (De Medeiros) and two small children Cyrus (Bour) and Lili (Balland). Perhaps the core script problem lies in the graphic novel’s premise and the film’s central conceit.
In the end, for all the film’s wry humour, magic-carpet moments of visual ravishment, seductive Persian fatalism and tugs at the heartstrings, Chicken With Plums fails to make a convincing case for its own cinematic adaptation. So many of the things that work in the book - flashbacks and flashes forward, a mix of character and caricature, the protagonist’s existential meanderings - serve only to weigh down the film’s dramatic movement and freshness. The directors seem unable to get very far away from their source material - Satrapi’s own graphic novel Chicken With Plums. There’s still plenty to like here along the way, not least the stylised Arabian Nights mise en scene, which uses painted backdrops and animated sequences to give the film a fairy-tale veneer of Persian romance.Ĭhicken With Plums fails to make a convincing case for its own cinematic adaptation.īut although it has similarities to the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this period tale is never going to be Amelie in Tehran. Paradoxically, that cartoon was more of a dramatic film, while this live-action feature about a Persian violinist who reviews his past life and great lost love as he pines to death in bed is more the whimsical cartoon, the cinematic doodle. Delight and boredom vie for supremacy while watching Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s pretty but ultimately empty follow-up to their breakout animated feature Persepolis.
0 kommentar(er)
