NasserAli has decided to die. After rejecting the conventional forms of suicide asmessy and undignified, he simply takes to bed, refuses food and waits for theinevitable visit of the angel of death. Nasser was once a great concertviolinist but his career has evaporated. His marriage is an unpleasant silencebroken by outbursts of bitter anger. His life is gradually deflating like atire from many small punctures—until a pair of disappointments entirelyflattens his will to continue.
Inthat bare synopsis, Chicken with Plums (out on DVD) suggests Ingmar Bergman athis most dire. But the latest film by Iranian expatriate Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) is shot through withdark irony, yet without denying sympathy for the major characters. Althoughleavened with humor, Chicken with Plums is a tragedy of loveless marriages andthe lofty pursuit of art that fails deliver either happiness or satisfaction.
InChicken with Plums,Satrapi moves beyond the relatively straightforward autobiography of Persepolis, an animated featurethat illustrated her self-imposed French exile from her homeland, which fell toKhomeini when she was just 14. With a more complicated narrative and a richeremotional palette than its predecessor, Chicken with Plums is sometimesreminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie in its quirky blend of the hyper-realand the surreal, its characters who inhabit a world that often resembles amontage of moving postcards.
Thestory is largely set in Teheran, 1958, recreated with deliberate artifice onthe soundstage of Berlin’s famed Babelsberg studio. The city is at thethreadbare cusp of modernity and tradition; Islamic zealots are nowhere to beseen and a giant poster of Sophia Loren dares passersby from the wall of thePersepolis cinema. The sad eyes of Nasser (Mathieu Amalric) flare easily intoanger or even madness when confronted by what he sees as his failed life. Henever cared for his wife, who was madly in love with him, but was nudged intomarriage by his mother. Frustrated by Nasser’s rejection, she becomes a thornof constant recrimination in his side. The one he loved returned his feelings,but was forbidden him by her father, who believed a musician could give her nofuture. “You don’t remember me?” he asks a woman who might be her in a chanceencounter. “To tell the truth, not at all,” she replies coldly. It was thebeginning of Nasser’s end.
Oneother heartbreak prompted his death wish. His brother, a Communist and aserious-minded fool, triggers it by sending him to a shop to buy aStradivarius. It’s a dark place of wonder filled with ouds and carpets andsaffron, with a whiff of opium in the air and a trickster shopkeeper who gladlyrelieves the musician of his savings in exchange for a mysterious package.Nasser opens it upon returning home to discover a broken old fiddle—a mockingsymbol of his life.
Chickenwith Plumsis an agile juxtaposition of styles. Animation shows stories from Nasser’schildhood and fables from the angel of death; there are wordless scenes toldthrough yearning eyes that could have come from a great silent film; GermanExpressionism envelopes a flashback to Nasser’s unhappy grade school, whichresembles a set from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; the realism is infusedwith magic. But the film’s visual mastery reveals an emotionally complex web ofunfulfillment, a melancholy that resonates beyond the surface theme of lovelessmarriage. Nasser is both tragic and nasty, touching in his love for hisdaughter and comically pretentious as he solemnly imparts to his children amorsel of deathbed wisdom. “It is through art that we understand life,” heinforms them. They giggle in response and little wonder. Nasser Ali hasunderstood very little.
