Chicken with Plums

Chicken with Plums (Poulet aux Prunes, 2011) is a dark-comic fable you can watch online on iFILM, from Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, the directors of Persepolis. When the beloved violin of renowned Iranian musician Nasser-Ali Khan is smashed, he loses all reason to live and retreats to his bed to die within eight days.

Mathieu Amalric plays Nasser-Ali, with Golshifteh Farahani, Isabella Rossellini, Jamel Debbouze, and Édouard Baer. Those eight days unspool in fragments — hallucinations, visits from the Angel of Death, flashbacks to the woman he gave up decades before. The film turns out to be less about dying than about the specific moment a life lost its point.

Satrapi and Paronnaud adapted their own graphic novel, as they did with Persepolis, which took the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007. Stream Chicken with Plums online on iFILM.