Poulet aux prunes is a grand, romantic life story about love, loss, regret and the sadness that can be evoked by a violin – not only through music, but through the instrument itself. It is all melancholy and loss, and delightfully comedic, with enough but not too much magic realism. The story as it stands could be the scenario for an opera.

The film begins in Tehran in 1958, when the shah ruled a secular Iran not yet stilted by Islamic fundamentalism. Little is made of politics in the film, and still less of religion; it is all told through the soulful eyes of a master violinist named Nasser Ali, played by the familiar French actor Mathieu Amalric […].” Freely moving between past and present, the film paints his middle-class Persian family as he develops into a mediocre violinist, meets and loses the great love of his life, and transforms his pain into greatness.

Poulet aux prunes was shot on soundstages in Berlin, creating an intimate Tehran that is sometimes enhanced by animation and by several clouds of smoke, one that a savant tells Nasser Ali contains the soul of his mother (Isabella Rossellini). The extraordinary cast also includes Maria de Medeiros as Faringuisse, the wife his family made him marry; Golshifteh Farahani as Irane, the clockmaker’s daughter who is the love of his life; Edouard Baer as Azrael, the Angel of Death who is the narrator, and Chiara Mastroianni as Lili, Nasser Ali’s daughter as an adult.

[…] Working here in live action with an adaptation of another of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels, following Persepolis, Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud give themselves more stylistic freedom than even animation allows. One of the film’s particular strengths is its portrait of an Iran that sheltered invaluable little shops and expressive old savants, and had not yet been dragged into the future – or the past, you decide.

Roger Ebert, “Chicago Sun-Times”, 22 August 2012