This is a review of The Patience Stone (2012) (seen at Saffron Screen)
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10 February
This is a review of The Patience Stone (2012)
Viewed at Saffron Screen (@Saffronscreen), in Saffron Walden (and on a recommendation from @amandarandall5)
Am I so much as... being seen ?
Play, Samuel Beckettt
The Patience Stone (2012) is a film that could be set anywhere, in any time, in case one wants to read in condemnations of where it appears to be set and its rules and religion, but the simple fact is that it acts as an inverted One Thousand and One Nights, where the nameless man and we are both an audience to his nameless wife’s confessions : only the film has to interest just us, to stop us cutting off its head by walking out, although we suspect that the husband, willy-nilly, can hear every word…
With all the adeptness and beauty that Zrinka Cvitesic brought in the role of Danica in My Beautiful Country (2012) to a bedbound Ramiz (Misel Maticevic), a film released in the same year, Golshifteh Farahani tends to her husband, who appears to be in a coma : at the start of the film, she is doubting what she has been told, because the mullah said that her husband would be well in two weeks, and it is the sixteenth day, with him not better, and her running out of money for serum.
Birds* that emerge from darkness on the curtains to a point of maximum light and then back toward shade open the film : they tell us at all sorts of levels that there will, although this is essentially a chamber work (set primarily in the woman’s house and grounds, but also her aunt’s former and present flat, and the street), be a journey, and the film will waver between light and dark.
(Sadly, there are two places where the quality of digital image-capture, as against so beautifully done on film in Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman (2013), lets the aesthetics of the film down, and it verges on pixellation - briefly, both times, in the scene in the basement, and when Farahani is first lit by the light of the hurricane-lamp. That said, the criticism draws attention to how very good the image was the rest of the time that these stood out as momentary exceptions.)
Necessarily, with a man in a coma and despite conflict going on, one is tied, but the inventiveness of blocking the scenes in the principal room is anything but limited, and makes not just for variety, but also for some very striking and even beautiful angles. The man (Hamid Djavadan) and Farahani are in this with such conviction, that, apart from visits from the mullah and a soldier, and time with her children, and her aunt and her family, we barely realize that we are thrown back on their resources.
As a sort of Scheherezade, the woman has a voice, but not for telling stories, such as one that might narrate what happened to the stone of the title that her aunt is reminded of : the account of how she became pregnant might even be from the Nights, with its questionable, but inventive, solution to a practical problem.
It is the final part of what she has been telling her husband throughout the film, and not without reason – so much that she has already related, both of the present and of her past, sometimes speaking aloud, sometimes as if to him within her head, has built up to this revelation. Spurred on by what her aunt has said about the stone, she has continued her confession, even down to having let a visiting cat eat one of her father’s fighting quails and getting a scar by her right eye about which her husband, who maybe has never properly seen her, has never asked.
The very shocking end of the film is ambiguous, and could represent two or three possibilities, on different literal or figurative levels. Twice, once when we think that she might really go away for good because of the impossible conditions in which she is having to leave (and for which she blames her husband), she tells him to ‘Go to hell’, and there is much frank language about sex, including the insult that got her husband into the fight with which he lies wounded. She has had, often enough with her aunt’s advice, had to make her way in this difficult culture, and the film celebrates female ingenuity in getting around male oppression whilst still pretending to be subservient.
The film is thoughtful, throwing one back on one’s preconceptions, and (not knowing much of the woman’s reliance on her aunt) we do not understand at the time why she tells the captain ‘I sell my body’, because his reaction is the last thing that we imagine she wanted : it goes back to the woman’s place, as the aunt expounds the male psychology.
All that the woman has been bottling up, keeping inside – that is why Beckettt is quoted at the head of this review, because, not least in the trilogy of plays* that The Royal Court (@royalcourt) is reviving, he writes (Not I) a part for Mouth, who cannot seem to stop talking, but who is, as the characters in Play are (a man, his wife, and his lover), looking for a response to this flood of words. Hence the quotation, where the Man momentarily interjects the possibility that there is not even an observer to what he is going through by telling his story : as with our lead, he has no name.
Here, that confession is to a man who may not have the conscious faculty to hear it, but for whom the truth is being laid out with candour (as that trilogy of novels taught Beckettt to do). It may not sound much of a basis for a film, but with excellent realizations of Max Richter’s music (which was such a strength of the rather disregarded Sarah’s Key (2010)), carefully wrought cinematography from Thierry Arbogast, and, as well as from those mentioned, lovely performances from Massi Mrowat (the soldier) and Hassina Burgan (the aunt), it is electric.
End-notes
* A twitcher would know what they are, but maybe ducks – thoughts were of M. C. Escher’s panoramic mirror-image.
** Though not written as a trilogy, unlike Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and maybe not even for performance together.
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
