Chicken with Plums is the story of a famous musician whose prized instrument has been ruined. Unable to replace his violin, he decides to die, and eight days later, he renders his soul, yet what seems like the end is really just the beginning. Under its romantic allure, this film is conceived as a thriller with flashbacks and flash forwards which shed light on Nasser’s personality and the reasons for his despair. Death is used as a springboard to talk about life.
The central themes of our film are the complexities of the world and the mysteries of the human soul. That’s why this film can jump registers from dramatic to comic to heartbreaking, because life is exactly like that. What interests us is not whether Nasser will die nor how, but why. We all share his universal quest to know, because it addresses the crystallization and the roots of our emotional life. We have been working as a duo since Persepolis, and our collaboration demonstrates the absurdity of the term “culture shock”. Coming from two different cultures, being of opposite sexes and not sharing the same background, we still managed to blend a mutual culture for ourselves. What interests us is this melting, this mixing – the choice of making this film which takes place in Iran with French players such as Mathieu Amalric, Edouard Baer and Chiara Mastroianni, Italian actress Isabella Rossellini, Iranian Golshifteh Farahani and Moroccan Jamel Debbouze only emphasizes more the universality of our purpose and the richness of diversity. It’s like Lubitsch who made films in America which took place in Prague or Warsaw with American actors. In any case, the stage is a place where someone plays someone else. Our Tehran is imaginary and it is not be anchored in the idea of reconstitution. The city is created entirely in a studio where the locations and the actors are treated sublimely, like in the magic of 50s Technicolor movies where realism was less important than aesthetics. This artistic choice helped us to avoid mannerism and helped us reinvent by using models, trompe l’oeil, backdrops, the artificial and the abstract which we needed to achieve the timelessness of our fable.