It’s a beautiful look at Iran years before the Shah was overthrown and the country went through it’s changes.  But the bittersweet loveliness doesn’t translate into an engrossing film.  Instead, Chicken With Plums is a film that looks tasty when it heads your way, has it’s tasty bits here and there, but ultimately leaves an unsatisfied aftertaste.

Nasser Ali Khan, a brilliant world-renown violinist, has suffered the ultimate heartbreak for a musician; the loss of his beloved violin.  He searches for a replacement, but can find nothing to compare.  So he decides that since life is no longer worth living, he will go ahead and die.  Taking to his bed, he settles in to wait for the inevitable.  As he waits, the story of his life and the lives of those around him are told in flashbacks, letting you see what happened in his life to make Khan the man he is.

I have to come clean here.  I’ve never been a fan of the “Quirky, Cute Bittersweet” genre of foreign films.  Movies like Amélie that push creativity just for the sake of being funky leave me cold.  So when Chicken With Plums reveals itself to be one of those quirk-loving films that is also kind of a downer, my heart sank a little.  Yet there are moments of animation and surrealism that are the best parts of this film.  Cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne (Coco Before Chanel) is to be commended for his ability to transform a simple sunset by a tree into a breathtaking fairytale landscape.

This film flows like a graphic novel, with asides, breaks with continuity and fantasy elements.  That’s no wonder, considering directors/screenwriters Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi are working from Satrapi’s graphic novel.  But they leave the animated world of Persepolis for live action this time around.  I’d say that perhaps that was a bad idea, but the performances in Chicken With Plums are so well done it’s a hard call to make.  Mathieu Amalric’s (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) Khan is all steely-eyed determination and gruff visage…or so we think.  Maria de Medeiros plays his wife Faringuisse, a woman that has come in second for so many years that the love she has for Khan slowly morphs into shrewishness.  Golshifteh Farahani is ethereal as Irâne, a mysterious woman from Khan’s past that ties everything together at the end.  And Isabella Rosselini as Khan’s mother Parvine proves once again that she has become more than a pretty face; she’s a wonderful, graceful character actor.

Here’s where Chicken With Plums fails; in trying to tell the story of a man who has lived for his music, it gives us a protagonist so empty it’s difficult to feel any compassion for him.  As his life unspools, we catch glimpses here and there of a man who was different, could have been different, but instead chose to be angry with the world instead.  His bitterness bleeds into his marriage, his children and even manages to make Death himself take pause.  (Though to be fair the scene with Khan and Death/Azraël is one of my favorites in this film.  Very The Seventh Seal.)  At the end, when he’s approaching his own death, he begins to see the mistakes he’s made.  We also get to see exactly what caused him to cut himself off from the world, and how that played out with others in his life.  And it could melt the heart of the Grinch on his worst day.  But this heart-tugging ending fails to perk up the hard-hearted emptiness of the rest of the film.  Beautifully shot, marvelously acted and bittersweet…still, Chicken With Plums makes you wait til the end of the film to finally connect with it’s characters.  And by then it’s too late.