The Patience Stone (2012)

The Woman: "How is it possible to live with a bullet in the neck? You are the one that is wounded and I am the one that suffers."

By Atiq Rahimi
With Golshifteh Farahani, Hamid Djavadan and Massi Mrowat

I heard about The Patience Stone before it came out while I was browsing through Golshifteh Farahani's filmography and upcoming films. I was eager to see it.

A wife watches over her husband who got shot in the neck during the war. The husband is not responsive and the woman runs out of money to pay the pharmacist and she has to use a mix of water and sugar to keep him alive. When the war intensifies, the woman has to hide her two daughters with her aunt and she keeps visiting her husband at great risks. However, an interesting relationship develops as the woman starts talking to the husband and telling him secrets she would never tell anyone. A tale says that one can confide in a stone, called the patience stone, and the person starts feeling better and when all the secrets are told, the stone will explode and the person will be freed.

The movie is really beautifully filmed and through the raw corners of a desolated house, the hands of the wife caring for the husband or the tank that seems to shoot through the window they all culminated to create a very colorful painting of a war ridden place. The woman is multilayered and really well portrayed by Golshifteh Farahani.

The movie takes an unexpected turn when it develops a very sensual vibe and even though it first felt out of place, it grew on me to be believable and that it was useful to the film. On top of that, there are other themes that find their way in through the film like the condition of women, insanity and of course mere survival. The condition of women is not much of a surprise, whenever we see a movie dealing with the situation in Afghanistan we are bound to find a dose of it, but the other themes were good surprises. The movie does not deal with war although it is a war movie, war is the canvas to the oil painting that are the characters.

Speaking of characters, one shouldn't expect too many of them, we will only learn about the husband through the wife's words and we will barely hear the daughters. We are clearly dealing with a movie centered on a woman character and it really blossoms when we see that we are not dealing with a perfect woman or a bad woman but we see a woman trying to live with her flaws and trying to cope with the burden of her husband that won't die to set her free.

The real tour de force could be that the movie empowers a woman in a situation where most women are powerless. The character of the young soldier is ambiguous but represent another form of oppression and is possibly just another casualty of war. The movie left me with very good impressions although I had some reserves on the whole experience, it overall felt like a great piece of work tied together.

I liked: Colors. War. Strong woman character fighting through her flaws. The patience stone metaphor.

I disliked: Confuse at times. I wish we had more background on the secondary characters. The ending could have been more striking.

78/100
Golshifteh Farahani shines in this role that occupies the entire movie. This unnamed woman could be a lot of women.