Review of Chicken with Plums

The story starts in Tehran in 1958, then leaps backward and forward in time, roaming the globe, using the kind of visual flourishes and storytelling shortcuts that have more in common with a comic book than with an earnest indie drama. Just as the plot combines fantastical and biographical elements, some of it is reportedly based on Satrapi's own family legends, so the filmmaking veers from straightforward to more out sized. The tonal shifts don't always work. (A fake sitcom sequence bombs badly, for example.) But the nested narrative structure gives the movie a sense of inevitability, making it all the more powerful when Amalric's wife and kids try to figure out what could make him happy. What they don't realise is that his depression only has a little to do with them, and a lot to do with living for decades under the heavy boot of fate.