User reviews

The Patience Stone is based on an old Persian fable about a stone to whom one can confide all one's problems and worries. Here though the stone is an Afghan man, reduced to a vegetable state by the war. His wife (Golshifteh Farahani) uses his inability to comprehend and talk back to tell him things that she would not dare to say otherwise. With his disability she's been left to feed herself, her two children and continue buying medicine to keep her husband alive. The only job available for an Afghan woman in her desperate situation it seems is prostitution.

Atiq Rahimi has directed from his own novel. He wrote the script with the renowned veteran screen writer Jean-Claude Carrierre. It is, I feel, a story best suited to theatre with its long monologues. The film however, belongs to and is carried by Golshifteh Farahani's magnificent performance. This is a very tough role where she has to, for most part, talk to a body lying motionless and unresponsive on the ground, unable to engage in any dialogue. A poetic film which is not for all tastes but which will richly reward those who appreciate its form and messages.

Universities across the world put forward that humans choose their own partner and marriage, and that everyone is the same as a Western person. Yet we know that this isn't the case.

This film presents the life of an Afghan woman, who is in an arranged marriage, and if he dies, she will simply be married off to one of his brothers. It's an environment where there is no love between husband and wife. The film gives a rare presentation of the lives of women in the non-Western world. It's probably the best film I've seen to do this. Actress Golshifteh Farahani does a great job of presenting the material in a warm and likable fashion.

It's worth watching and thinking about. A little slow, but very well made, scripted and acted. Very watchable.

If you're interested in what life is like for non-Western women, it's definitely worth seeing.

Awe-inspiringly powerful, The Patience Stone is one of the greatest character films I have ever seen - without a doubt. With immaculate cinematography, camera work and acting, this stands tall as a film I can't describe to be anything other than perfect.

Became an instant favorite. It does not matter what country this takes place in, and that it's never named. Often the enemy is easily indistinct.

Those little girls were precious, running in the street, in the cellar wile bombs are going off. Been there. Been around men like that too.

Loved the colors of Golshifteh Farahani's clothes, and the way they billowed magnificently about her. One of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her spirit shines through.

The sex, better said as rape, is more spoken and little shown.There is one frame of Eros though, love making, you'd see in a Fine Arts Museum.

The issue of child brides is a theme, and these girls are given away like chattel. They do not choose this.

Those who do not know how to make love, make war, and that is not just the kind with guns. 10/10

So often times I find I am most appreciated in my role as husband, the less I say. Honestly, it came up the evening before I watched this film. That being said, I'm not quite willing to take a bullet in the neck to help the process. Alas only a bullet and no Oscar for Hamid Djavadan as the husband in this film. Although it used to be a theory that mute actresses could win an award for similar roles.

Golshifteh Farahani is the actress here, and far from mute, she finds her voice/strength/resolve. Her beauty is striking, did anyone else find that detracted some from the dire dilapidation of her village and situation. The filmmakers did try to muss her up some, but in "The Patience Stone" we are reminded again that a jewel in the rough is still a jewel. Radiant.

And this film is all hers, with perhaps the most soliloquies you'll see this side of graduation week at an arts college. Her face runs an impressive gamut of expression, but as I bought the air of impending danger (one scene in particular with a neighbor driven mad really resonated), that I had a hard time with her character registering anything more than shock. Granted I realize far too many people (and children) grow up in such troubling circumstances, and that alone is mind-boggling. (And soul-shaking.) There are interesting side-story and back-story aspects (The Aunt!!) so perhaps the book would be best to start with (I had intended to, but didn't get around to it.) Mostly this film is a story of perhaps the most impossible marital counseling one could ever expect.

Although, there are some things I bet you will expect while watching it, and while the fair Ms. Farahani is Iranian, this film is definitely French and becomes so the more it progresses.

Still something different to watch and contemplate (no Fatwa so far for the director). I did learn of Dari (a Farsi variant from Afghanistan, but I've no clue what native speakers of either thought about this film, and I would be curious.) Also the yellow burqa was an indelible image. I looked a little for Islamic symbolism for the same. Watching Farahani flip it on and still infuse that billowing robe with her energy was eye-catching. I did wonder as she went into a pharmacy at one point how people could quickly tell who is who in such a situation. I imagine it can be done, something about the specific burqa and how the woman moves within it....of course the voice, but it seems having a stunt double or misdirection/fake alibi by virtue of the burqa could happen.

Probably identifying women in their burqas is easier than I can imagine, but perhaps misleading mullahs is easier than they too can imagine? Let me know when that film is made ;> The film definitely felt more like a play come to the big screen than a book, but perhaps the book was streamlined to fit. Guess I'd recommend trying to read it first, but watching the film is worth one's while, especially for fawning fans of Farahani.

By the way, perhaps leaving some stones unturned is okay?

Noted Afghan born writer/director Atiq Rahimi adapts his own prize-winning novel to a screen drama in The Patience Stone.

It is the story a nameless Muslim Woman (Golshifteh Farahani) caught in the cusp of a fierce war zone in an unnamed country (what could probably be Afghanistan). She is tending to her much aged husband (nameless gain), a wounded warrior who is presently in a vegetative state with no apparent sign of life or senses. Early in the movie when the onset of war is obvious, she packs off her two children to a safe haven. However, she is forced to stay on to look after her husband. A husband whom she had not met even after her marriage. She married a photograph of him as he was fighting for the cause.

On his return, the husband turns out to be an oppressive and conservative person in stark contrast to all her dreams. Now, on finding him in a comatose deaf-mute state, she, for the first time since her marriage, feels a surge of freedom. She sees him as the titular mythological Syngue Sabour or The Patience Stone to which one can pour one's heart out without any inhibitions. She feels herself recounting to him her deepest feelings and secrets to a great cathartic and therapeutic effect.

The movie, in most part, is a monologue, by the woman played by Golshifteh Farahani, confiding her secrets to her husband. The marvellous actress delivers a stellar performance which is the keystone holding the entire movie together. In a performance that straddles a whole spectrum of emotions, she forges an immediate and compelling connect with the viewers and keeps them emotionally invested in the story.

Writer/Director Atiq Rahimi provides snapshots of the social and political conditions of the region. While Farahani's narrative reveals the ultra conservative male dominated society with little, if any, freedom or respect for women, her travails during the ongoing war point to the existential crisis that hounds the populace there.

For people form middle east it would be good to know that women are as human as men. For the rest of the world its good to know that human feeling exist the same way even under hijab! The most impressive line is "those who don't know to make love, make war". Golshifteh is a pioneer in breaking the control freak nature of middle eastern culture which I believe is the main factor that underlies sexual complexes and subsequent dysfunction in the layers of society. She, aware or not, is the first person who is putting an end to this. The picture and landscaping is realistic and the motion of the lens is so touchable in alternative induction of life threatening vigilance and peaceful love making moments. Filmography explains the culture for non-afghan viewers pretty digestible.

In a war-torn Muslim nation (that we can presume is Afghanistan) we are introduced to a young woman (Golshifteh Farahani) who is trying to look after her two young daughters whilst their father is lying lifeless on a mattress with a bullet hole in his neck. His colleagues have long deserted them and so she must try - with the help of a nearby aunt (Hassina Burgan) - to keep her family safe whilst nursing her husband as best she can. There are militia everywhere and with him paralysed on the floor, she has to find ingenious ways to try and hide him from their murderous hands. As the days pass, she begins to talk to the man (and us) and that provides for much of the fairly traumatic backstory that sees her exposed to brutality, indifference and negligence since childhood. She also has an encounter with the local commander whom she convinces she sells her body "for the pleasure of men". He is disgusted but seems to have mentioned this to his men as a nervous young man (Massi Mrowat) appears on the doorstep ostensibly just looking to pay for sex but actually he is in need of a great deal more. Vulnerabilities are rife amidst the chaos of war. Gradually, her memories become more descriptive, more explicit and by the conclusion we know much more about her than perhaps she had realised. Is he listening, though? It's most unusual to have an incapacitated man, on death's door, serving as a conduit for a story like this but it works effectively. She tells us a story riddled with persecution - physically and intellectually and once she has opened the floodgates, her resentment pours out. It's not a rant, there's not really that much rancour. It is a measured and rational evaluation of her life and of her treatment by those she loved and who were supposed to care for her in return. It invites us to critique the austerity of her faith, and of her sex's role within that framework, without telling us exactly what to think. Any judgements here are ours. It can get a little repetitive at times but Faharani exudes a sense of intensity that does make this quite a poignant watch.

Man, does this sound like a loser -- a woman tends her unconscious husband at home and heaps all of her grief and sorrow on the poor guy's insensible bald head. A Lifetime Movie Network special, right? But no! I was caught up in it at once and couldn't break away. The wife is in her mid-thirties and, while by no means glamorized, has attractive features, striking. Somebody should paint her portrait.

But nobody will because she, her older husband, and their two little girls live in a shabby apartment in some unnamed city in the Middle East. They depend on a water bearer, who may or may not show up because the dusty streets are dangerous, what with the militia on one side and the rebels on the other. They have no electricity either and live by lamplight at night, when they dare turn it on at all.

If she goes out, she wears a mustard-colored burqa, which had always impressed me as a heavy garment made of something like canvas but is actually a thin, silken, all-around cape that's easily slipped back onto the shoulders. The woman has few friends -- one of her neighbors has gone round the bend because the men of her house have been slaughtered and hung upside down -- and her only relative is an older aunt who runs a whorehouse. There is a Mullah who knocks at the gate from time to time but he's extremely demanding and his predictions are wrong, so she turns him away.

After the first two or three minutes, it lost any resemblance to a Lifetime Movie Network special. When the rebels (or the militia, I couldn't tell which) break into her apartment, she hides the wounded husband in a cubby hole to keep him from being killed. When the two armed and ugly men begin to take an interest in her she lies and claims to be one of her aunt's prostitutes, which disgusts the men to the extent that they leave her impure body alone. Well, except that the younger of the two -- an inexperience young man with a stutter -- returns later, flings a handful of bills on the floor, throws her down among them, pulls off their hampering undergarments, and achieves intromission and ejaculation at almost the same instant. "Is this your first time?", she asks wonderingly, and he nods.

Thereafter he appears with some regularity desiring her services. He even secretly leaves a small bandanna-wrapped pile of food on their window sill. He's gotten to kind of like her, despite her professed profession. She rather appreciates his coming too -- not just for the money, which buys them food and water, but because he's so shy and inexperienced that she can guide him in foreplay and tell him what to do to give her pleasure. She begins to groom herself more carefully and, anticipating his arrival, she dresses in becoming clothes instead of her usual rags.

That brings us back to the balding husband, flat on his back, a bullet in his neck, the result of a personal quarrel. She's keeping him alive through a tube running from a drip sack nailed to the wall -- just water and sugar. And just how did hubby treat her, even since he married her when she was fifteen? Like an animal. The more beans she spills, the more we realize how complicated, how adversarial, their relationship was. He'd never kissed her or fondled her. The woman's job was to produce children. After the first months of their marriage, his family began to think she was sterile, when in fact it was he who was shooting blanks. Consequently, she allowed herself to be secretly impregnated by two other men.

The title, "The Patience Stone," refers to a legend in which a character confesses all her grief to a stone and when the stone finally shatters, she's freed of all her guilt and sorrow. It plays into the movie's climactic scene, which I won't describe.

The acting is as good as it is in any Hollywood movie, the setting is evocative, and all the elements fit together properly. It's pretty well done. You're not likely to be bored.

But I have to add two observations. The voices tell me to do it. I know two anthropologists who have done field work in Middle Eastern cultures. One told me that she'd met a middle-aged lady who had never had a period because she was constantly made pregnant by her husband. Another told me that the burqa is not a particularly good way of hiding a woman's beauty from the boys on the street corners, who sometimes whistled when a woman wearing a tent passed by. They muttered, "Wow -- look at those FEET!" And why not? The feet are the windows of the soul. So it is written.

A story of pain, resilience, loyalty and terrible choices which those of never (yet) subjected to the everyday horrors of war on our own doorstep have had to face. Brilliant story, well portrayed in subtle terms. No high drama which made it all the more poignant and human. Not one for the wham bang brigade, more one for the thoughtful watcher. Exquisitely shot: colours, set ups, scenes - everything was admirable. Unlike any film I have seen before. Brings home the pity of war, the damage it does to ordinary lives. Brilliant performances from everyone. See it. Remember it. Learn from it - in every way, as a human and as a film-maker.

"The Patience Stone" is a Drama movie in which we watch a woman with her children trying to survive in a war ridden country. Her husband is injured and she has to look after him too, without any help from anyone. She has a lot of secrets and now seems a good time to say everything to his husband.

I liked this movie because it presented many sensitive topics with a realistic way, something that made us feel and understand what this woman was feeling and how difficult is her life. The direction which was made by Atiq Rahimi, it was good and he succeeded on making the audience understand many things regarding war and culture. The interpretation of Golshifteh Farahani was simply amazing and I believe that she did an outstanding job. To sum up, I have to say that "The Patience Stone" is a nice drama movie that everyone should watch because I am sure that after watching it, you will reconsider many things which we all take for granted.

An argument can be made for four stars based on a few minor weaknesses in the acting, script, location, directing but the uniqueness of this story overrides being that overly punctilious.

We see the world through the forbidden thoughts and eyes of a young attractive female; as a wife and as a Muslim as she faces the challenge of surviving alone and yet caring for a comatose husband and two young daughters, within a war ravaged side street in Kabul, Afghanistan. The period is shortly after the Soviet incursion into that country but just as poignant today. She is constantly threatened by her loneness, her poverty and by armed militants imposing their wills upon this street's inhabitant.

Another movie concerning the travails of girls and women in he Muslim world is the enjoyable and succinct "Wadjda". We should all support those organizations that try to give girls & women a chance at education in Afghanistan, Pakistan as well as other countries.

This was a movie unlike anything I have ever seen. A real eye opener into life in a war-torn country. Fascinating, lovely, and tragic.

One of those very rare masterpieces that come as sheer satisfactions after years of wait! The whole movie reveals itself with a poetic subtleness of sorts... The innocence, the earthly beauty and the strength that Farahani's character in the film demanded are so exquisitely conveyed by her. There is a 'Halo' that surrounds Farahani's character throughout. The metaphorical references used to convey the broader meaning of the plot are simply magical in their appeal.

The complexity of human relations and how at times they become so dependent on our social hierarchies and cultural structures, that its almost a magic to sanely come out of those. From the time the film opens, the gravity of the characters pull you deep into the film and are very difficult to let go of, even long after the movie ends..!! Persian and Afghan cinema has always that 'literary' kind of capacity which broadens ones perspectives, however this one is at a whole new level. Such work is a rarity in most of the other modern Asian cinema.. Its quite amazing that this insightful art work come from one of the most politically disturbed places of our world..

The war-torn, beleaguered Muslim city and characters of The Patience Stone are nameless and fictional, yet all too real and representative of actual people, places and stories from distant lands that flit on the periphery of our awareness in the news. A woman (Golsifteh Farahani) cares for a husband in a coma and two young children in a war zone. Her cruel, indifferent and frequently absent husband was not a ray of sunshine while conscious, nor was he much of a listener, so in a way nothing really changed. Encouraged by a story of a woman who learned to transcend suffering by revealing her desires and secrets to a "patience stone," the woman substitutes her comatose husband for the stone. Now, like it or not, he has to listen! Now she has a voice. She pours out her heartache, painful memories and passions in the hope of a better future.

This fascinating, enlightening and heartrending film provides insight into the plight of women trapped by obsolete customs and insensitivity. The Patience Stone is written and directed by man, but one who is sympathetic to a good cause. While it lacks depth in imagery and action, and is pretty much a long monologue, The Patience Stone helps to illuminate the hearts of Muslim women and a distant area of the world. It is based on the director's novel of same name. Seen at the Miami International Film Festival.

The lead actress is superb . . .but this movie is more about the writing. This is an undisguised takedown on Islam, its commoditisation and suppression of women and the rampant egotistical honour-maniacal men who run this religion and so many countries under its control. It should be required viewing for anyone who thinks that any of the three Abrahamic religions are good. Then they will see them as manipulative and self-serving. So much misery delivered everyday in the name of the almighty. Whatever name you give him/her/it, the lives of their adherents are squashed, suppressed and minimised as a result. Its a brave film because religious criticism is still taboo, even in our supposed 'educated' world.