GOLSHIFTEH FARAHANI IN THE PATIENCE STONE

Kabul monologue

Afghan-born Atiq Rahimi's eponymous French bestseller, scripted here by French screenwriting great Jean-Claude Carrière and directed by Rahimi in Farsi, is a riff on all that's wrong with the situation of women in the rougher parts of the Middle East, the first of which is having to live in zones of perpetual war. The film reads, or views, like a novella that's been converted into a play. But that does not keep its pared-down settings, and symbolic cast -- good soldier/bad soldier, inert husband, raucous auntie, doomed neighbors, mullah kept at bay -- from being strong and sometimes heartbreaking, even as the physical realism of film makes the generic, abstract elements look more obviously abstract. The cinematography, with interiors and costumes as handsomely color-coordinated as if this were a production of the Kirov Ballet; the limpid sunlight on the rubble-strewn town with its horizons shining in the light of dusk or dawn, is never less than ravishing. You are watching an artificial chamber piece, but it still sometimes sings. It is always a pleasure to watch Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (who also like Rahimi lives in Paris) in the lead. (Both Rihami and the Iranian Faraani, she a big star in Iran now a recent refugee in France due to restrictions and condemnations at home, are on the way to becoming international cultural celebrities. ) She has the austere beauty of the young Joan Baez. If the basic situation is static -- the protagonist is a young wife who talks on and on to her husband lying paralyzed from a bullet -- it's also enlivened by stabbings, rape, and explosions.

The setting is described as "somewhere," but it's also obviously Kabul, Rahimi's birthplace from which he fled via Pakistan to France after the Soviet invasion. The bulk of the film was shot in Casablanca, Morocco, in a cement factory, though some exteriors were shot in Kabul (with the a stand-in for the lead in her mustard burqa in street scenes).

The woman played by Farahani is stuck in this urban war zone because she's taking care of her much older husband (Hamid Djavadan), who's been parallelized and apparently in a coma for several weeks from a bullet in his neck. He stares blankly into space, or at the ceiling; his eyes do not move. She gives him serum (when she has the money for it) and a sugar and salt drip into his mouth and for a while he seems merely a decorative symbolic male object: she dips a rag into a little bowl of water and wipes his brow. Finally she undresses and cleans him. After several terrifying attacks that cause damage to the building and leave her neighbors horribly murdered, she locates her feisty aunt (Hassina Burgan) and leaves her little girl with this woman, who tells her story of being turned into a servant of her husband's when it's found she's barren, then repeatedly raped, and then became a prostitute to make money and become independent.

The significant dialogue and storytelling concern sex. The protagonist has revelations of her own, which she addresses mostly to her immobile husband, and they are shockers. More than that she has relations with a stammering young soldier (Massi Mrowat), who thinks she's a prostitute, then falls in love with her, and this all happens a few yards away from her husband, whom she's hidden away in a kind of closet. This experience Rahimi has said is meant to be an awakening for her to the possibility that she can enjoy sex just for the pleasure, whereas in her previous experience it was only to make babies. That Rahimi juggles these heavy issues, with some pretty bold moments and some lewd talk, along with the dangerous wartime atmosphere where they may be blown up or killed at any moment, is a neat trick. The whole situation is borderline absurd at times, but Farahani, with her beauty and her solemnity and fierce confidence, very nearly carries it off. In the last shot of her face she is pale, glowing and radiant, a transcendantly gorgeous shot in a film full of gorgeous shots by DP Thierry Arbogast. At this point the film has, however, turned a little bit into a low keyed Grand Guignol. If that's not an oxymoron.

Glowing reviews of the original French-language book include Olivia Laing's in the Guardian; she calls it "a beautifully constructed, deeply memorable novella." It won the Prix Goncourt in 2008, suggesting its political commitment came sheathed in elegant style. Laing likens the book, because if its minimalism, to Beckett. However it must be said that a crucial difference is this: Beckett has no specific social or political axes to grind. Rihami does. He's a longtime exile who takes a rather intense and schematic view of his own country. The film is strong and handsome, but not altogether convincing, because it's so obviously making points. This is very far from, say, the complicated and specific sequences of events and more vérité style of Asghar Farhadi's universally admired A Separation, or many other recent Iranian films. The "patience stone" itself is a folklore fairy tale about a stone to which you can tell all your troubles. When they become too much, the stone bursts and your troubles are gone. The protagonist's immobile husband plays the role of the stone.

i]The Patience Stone/Syngué Sabour[/i] debuted at London and played at many other festivals including Toronto, opening theatrically in various countries including France 20 Feb. 2012 (Allociné press rating 3.6). This was Afghanistan's Best Foreign entry for the 2013 Oscars. It will show in the San Francisco International Film Festival, for which it was screened for this review. Release (Sony Pictures Classics): 14 Aug. 2013. Metacritic rating: 58.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.