Review of Chicken with Plums

Who knows the cartoon on which this film is based first realizes that its author, Marjane Satrapi, now also involved in this film project, has ensured that her original story was changed as little as possible. However, the beloved instrument of the musician, an Iranian tar (a kind of precursor of the modern guitar) now had to make room for a violin whose sounds resonate better with the western audience for whom the film was made. Secondly, you realize that the power of a strong story is separate from the medium to which it is transferred, be it the naive black-and-white drawings of the original or a detailed film version like this. When musician Nasser-Ali meets his lost love Irane after many years on the streets and she claims not to recognize him, he ends up in a downward spiral that eventually brings him face to face with death. He does not get out of bed anymore and during the eight days that he has left, he watches over his life with visions of past and future. In the present, attempts are still being made to reach him, but the decision is made for the melancholic musician. Although his wife loves him, he realizes that he is having a bad marriage in which there is a lot of bickering and if she ultimately destroys his violin this stresses the husband to the limit. All this despite the fact that he has two adorable children, now the girl is a bit more cute than her hyperactive brother and is closer in character to her father. It continues to amaze you where they get those talented children for such a film. In his visions he will see how they are doing: his daughter smokes herself to death after a tragedy and his son becomes a businessman in America with a bunch of obese children, his daughter in turn is so fat that she does not notice a pregnancy, and so we are suddenly three generations ahead. Irane, too, has now become a grandmother and of course she had recognized him, but despite her pain, she decided to let the past rest. Although the cartoon version is marketed as a kind of successor to the famous comic strip "Persepolis", which deals with the period of the Shah and the Islamic revolution, the history of that period in the film version is pushed even further into the background, although it is the case that the brother of the musician had been in jail because he was a communist and his son eventually had to flee to America after the revolution because he had been in the army, but I think you only notice that if you already know it from the book. In this sense, this story is much more a personal consideration of the consequences of the choices in your life independent of the great world events, or as the death angel Azrael also says: you only had this life.