56. Music &...

Lyrics

Music was my first love
And it will be my last
Music of the future
And music of the past

To live without my music
Would be impossible to do
In this world of troubles
My music pulls me trough

Music was my first love
And it will be my last
Music of the future
And music of the past


Music, John Miles sure does love himself some music. And he expresses it with a song I dislike a lot. Lyrically, all he is doing is making sentimental, meaningless statements about his love for music. That wouldn't be bad at all if he didn't deliver them as if he is making some sort of profound statement about music or himself as a musician. I find the composition itself also pretty uninteresting. His love for music never really shines through in this song. For all his repetitive claims about his love of music, he may as well sing about his love for, say, mathematics. The effect would be nearly the same. In any case, the movie I've linked this song to, about a man who is (nearly, and with good reason) literally in love with music, couldn't be more different. 

The Movie: Chicken with Plums (Poulet aux Prunes) (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Parronaud, 2011)

According to IMDB one of the next projects Marjane Satrapi will direct will be The Voices. A horror movie which IMDB synopses as follows: 'a disturbed factory worker who hears advice from his pet dog and cat is implicated in the accidental death of his co-worker." Now normally I wouldn't be very interested in a movie with such a (what I would consider) pretty stupid premise. But after only two movies Marjane Satrapi has completely convinced me to see everything she does. Persepolis was already a great film, Chicken with Plums is an even better one. I had seen it once already and loved it. After a second viewing it is even better. It's achievements are incredible. It has a marvelous, logically (and even tightly) constructed screenplay, yet the space it leaves itself for freewheeling and invention is enormous. And it damn well uses that space. 

At its core Chicken with Plums feels like a film version of a traditional folk tale. More specifically, one of those tales that seems to have been orally passed through the generations by grandmothers telling it to their grandchildren. While in each telling of a specific such tale the core remains, the teller usually grants him/herself the freedom to mix up the details and add the right combination of romance, magic, and adventure to connect best with the child the tale is being told to. Of course each of these tales also has some sort of (moral) lesson. Chicken with Plums is such a tale about a violinist who decides to lay in bed and die after his wife has broken his favorite violin. But it's more than just that. It is also a postmodern mash up of many of these tales Satrapi must have heard as a child. It is also a homage to them. If that's not enough the film is also a love letter to pre-1979 Iran, before the Iranian Revolution made it an authoritarian Islamic state. Lastly the movie is also a critique of the representations of Iran and its people in both Iran and the western world. Just like in Persepolis Satrapi wants to show that Iran is more than just a bunch of evil, Islamic man in beards being busy making nuclear bombs and oppressing women. She wants to show that there is beauty there in both the geographic and the personal sense. That it is a civilization with people caring about science, philosophy and culture. That the movie achieves all of these things is a testament to how great Satrapi and Parronaud manage to mix genres and tones. The movie shifts between being a (melo)drama, a romance, a (slapstick) comedy, a satire, a parody and an adventure movie. Often it is two (or more) of these things at the same time and never does the tone feel off in any way. 

The movie begins when Nasser-Ali (the violinist) who on his way to repair his favorite, now broken, violin, recognizes and addresses a woman. She doesn't recognize him though, which makes him very sad. Still, he continues on his way trying to fix his violin. When that proves to be impossible he hears from his brother that in Rasht, a city far away from Teheran, there is a man selling a Stradivarius. He goes on a long trip to buy it and back in Teheran the next morning he starts to play it. Depressed with the sound it makes he decides to not only never play violin, but even to die. He decides to this in a 'dignified' way, by laying in bed and not eating anything. 8 days later he'll be dead. In the rest of the movie we'll learn of Nasser-Ali's life, why his violin and his music meant so much to him, and why he decided to die right now. To tell his story Satrapi and Parronaud cut between the past and the present (and even the future) and between different story lines. All of these story lines come together in the masterful final 5-10 minutes when the full extent of Nasser-Ali's tragedy becomes clear.