MOVIE - The Patience Stone

R (1:38)

Limited Release 8/14/13

saw it at the Loft 10/1/13

RT Critic: 82  Audience:  69

Cag: 4.5 (Liked it a whole lot)  

Directed by the book's author, Atiq Rahimi

Sony Pictures Classic

In Farsi with English subtitles

My comments:  I am so glad that I saw this movie.  I'm not usually disappointed in the subtitled movies that make it to the US, and I'm so glad that, living in Tucson, I get the opportunity to see some of the really good ones.  The woman who plays the protagonist is truly beautiful.  The way in which she must live her life...and must have lived it previously...is almost impossible for me, as a middle-class American, to grasp. Thank goodness for films like this that help me really see the broader world, not from the eye of a journalist, but from the eye of a filmmaker.

From Rotten Tomatoes:  Author Atiq Rahimi's adapts his own bestselling novel about a Muslim woman whose paralyzed husband unconsciously assumes the role of a magical force, which shields her from the sorrows of life in her war-torn village. Her unnamed Middle Eastern country caught up in an insurrection, the loyal, thirtysomething wife faithfully sits watch over her vegetative husband, who has been all but forgotten by his brothers and fellow Jihadists. Over time, she gathers the courage to tell her husband all of thethings she had remained silent about during their 10 years of marriage. Throughout the course of these missives, she speaks frankly of the disappointments, sorrows, and sacrifices that have made her life so difficult throughout the previous decade. Only weeks later, when the isolated wife enters into a relationship with a young soldier, does she begin to reveal the woman who she had kept locked up deep inside ever since the day she was married.