is expected to be released to theaters later this year, and is a vastly different cinema experience from her much-praised first film, “Persepolis.”
To begin with, this is not an animated film, but a picture with real actors and actresses, though there are a few animated sequences.
The film is also not a political assault upon the current regime, but rather a nostalgic trip back to a dreamy Tehran of the 1950s.
However, it is like “Persepolis” in the sense that it is rooted in Satrapi’s family history. It tells the story, perhaps apocryphal, of an aging uncle who is a devoted violinist and is so dismayed when his violin is broken that he decides it is time to go to bed and die. His wife tries to coax him out of his reveries by cooking his favorite dish, chicken with plums, but she is unsuccessful.
“Chicken With Plums” is expected to be released later this year, following premieres at the London and Venice film festivals.
Recently, The Guardian of England interviewed Satrapi. As with every Iranian filmmaker, Satrapi was asked about such matters as the 2010 imprisonment of director Jafar Panahi, the collapse of the green revolution, and the alleged irregularities in the 2009 elections.
The Guardian finds her “surprisingly circumspect in her answers.” Although she appeared two years ago at the European parliament to protest the elections, she now parries The Guardian’s questions about politics.
“I was extremely moved and extremely interested,” Satrapi said of the Green Movement, but she then points out that she left Iran in 1994, and hasn’t visited the country in five years. “The information I have about Iran is
second hand,” she says.
Living in Paris, she feels she didn’t have the right to present herself as a cheerleader for street protests in which people were being shot. “It’s impossible. I can do it if I am there. I go out on the street and maybe I will receive a bullet like them, but I cannot sit in Paris and say to people, ‘Just
express yourself’.”
Satrapi was fiercely skeptical about politicians in general, and about sloganeering on behalf of any ideology. She believes a “lack of poetry and imagination” is what distorts people’s lives. She says “Chicken with Plums” is intended as a “celebration of beauty.”
Satrapi’s co-director on this film as on “Persepolis” is Vincent Paronnaud, a Frenchmen who may be the only man in the world who can work with the mercurial Satrapi. “Sometimes,” she says, “we become completely angry. He feels like hitting me. I feel like hitting him. We are like two angry dogs. But after an hour, it is finished.”
The Guardian notes that Paronnaud “nods placidly in agreement” with that description of their relationship. He says the 46 days spent shooting “Chicken With Plums” was “very stressful.”
Both Satrapi and Paronnaud were graphic artists who came together to do a graphic film and have together shifted to traditional directing of live actors.
Satrapi relates that she was a long time fan of Paronnaud’s work, but admits she took an intense dislike to him when they first met in Paris.
“I thought, ‘He’s an asshole.’ And he thought, ‘This woman is crazy.’” After several months they met again, started talking politics, “agreed on everything and became friends.”
