Chicken with Plums (2011)

This movie has an oddness about the story telling, somewhere between Wes Anderson and traditional Persian story telling.

The film, named for a traditional Persian dish, is a grand, romantic life story about love, loss, regret and the sadness that can be evoked by a violin — not only through music, but through the instrument itself. It is all melancholy and loss, and delightfully comedic, with enough but not too much magic realism. The story as it stands could be the scenario for an opera.  The film begins in Tehran in 1958, when the shah ruled a secular Iran not yet ruled by Islamic fundamentalism. Little is made of politics in the film, and still less of religion; it is all told through the soulful eyes of a master violinist named Nasser Ali.  

The setting is unusual, the story telling unique, but the story is very familiar.  Nasser falls in love with Iran, she with he, her father will not allow her to marry him, and Nasser's family pressured him into a loveless marriage with a woman who doesn't understand his passion for music.  She commits an act that plunges him into a deep depression, and we comes to see the whole sad story as the sum of the parts.  Unusual, but ultimately well worth watching.