Critic Reviews

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.

Although the story is mournful, the movie is buoyed by a heaven-scented surrealism.

While visually scrumptious, the movie struggles to reach a greater profundity that it never quite obtains, but its childlike emulation of a grand tragedy is indelibly precious.

Adapting Satrapi's graphic novel about a violinist (Mathieu Amalric) in late-1950s Tehran who's got a broken fiddle and a broken heart and takes to his bed, willing himself to die, the filmmakers rely on expressive eyes to carry a narrative style suitable for a silent movie.

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 outsized. The tonal shifts don't always work.

Both winsome and sophisticated, Chicken with Plums unfolds like a rich Persian carpet woven of memories and nostalgia in a colorful fantasy Iran of 1958, twenty years before the Islamic Revolution turned the country to somber grays.

You have no idea what's coming next, except that it will be wildly creative and beautiful. These two know how to mix up a very unusual and successful cinematic recipe.

The result is captivating, but not exactly moving: Nasser-Ali's grand passion is posited rather than communicated, in spite of Mr. Amalric's exquisitely soulful performance.

A fable about the damage done when a young couple is forced to part, Chicken with Plums is deeply melancholic, yet so full of humor and humanity that it pulses with life even while tracing the trajectory of a slow suicide.

A whimsical, sad, diverting and altogether delightful exploration of how cinema can benefit, not only from glancing back at its own past, but by staying open to parallel forms of presentation and play.