Chicken with Plums

The year is 1958, the city Tehran. Celebrated violinist Nasser Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric) has an unexpected encounter with a longlost love, but she fails to recognize him. He returns home, has an argument with his wife and, most troublingly, discovers that his prized violin has been broken. He's unable to replace it, can't conceive of life without the consolation of music, and soon finds that he can't get out of bed, where he lies locked both in dreams about his childhood and projections of his own children's futures. His reveries lay somewhere between fantasy and oblivion, and quickly assemble into a kind of thriller, riddled with flashbacks and flash-forwards (as well as a vision of a naked Sophia Loren), that illuminates his peculiar persona and the source of his despair.