A sensual title and a lovely score playing over enchanting black-and-white scenery promise much from “Chicken With Plums.” The film, set primarily in 1950s Tehran, stars Mathieu Amalric (“Quantum of Solace”) as Nasser-Ali Khan, a world-famous violinist who’s in a world-class funk over his irreparably broken violin. He buys a new one, a lemon, and then journeys far to buy the Stradivarius reputedly owned by Mozart.
That one isn’t good enough, either.
So Nasser-Ali does what anyone would do when he hears Mozart’s Strad and thinks, “Meh” — he takes to his bed and attempts to summon the Angel of Death.
The film’s unwavering constant: Nasser-Ali is an unbelievable pill. Either you find that tolerable or you do not, but a pill he remains, emphasized by Amalric’s bug-eyed, mopey performance, coming at you from underneath a moustache that resembles a tiny Maltese.
The many surreal flourishes, like the film’s giant breasts and petals floating through a pink-tinged sky, are supposed to be absolved of cringing obviousness because they’re, you know, poetic and exotic.
Fortunately, “Chicken With Plums” does have its pleasures, including Isabella Rossellini as the silkily jaded mother. Characters such as shrewish wife Faringuisse (a wonderful Maria de Medeiros) and Nasser-Ali’s brother (Eric Caravaca) are shown harshly, but the screenplay flashes back and forward in time to show the characters in entirely different lights. It’s a generous way for co-directors Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud to approach their story and, along with Olivier Bernet’s score, it’s the film’s greatest strength.
It’s all the more inexcusable, then, to find a spiteful, profoundly unfunny flash-forward showing the future of Nasser-Ali’s son in the US — one filled with awful food, a garish house, a blond bimbo wife, chubby dullard sons and a daughter so obese she doesn’t realize she’s pregnant. Interest withers, and the rest of the film is haunted by traumatized fears that Satrapi and Paronnaud might go for something that ghastly again.
Nasser-Ali’s lost love, subtly named Irâne (Golshifteh Farahani), enters the story very late, at which point we learn that she was divinely beautiful and truehearted, and — that’s pretty much it.
We do learn that Irâne helped the violinist connect his playing to deep emotion for the first time. If Nasser-Ali had shown less selfishness earlier, perhaps that would really mean something, but instead it offers more evidence that he’s the least appealing thing in his own story.