The Patience Stone

In a ruined city of rubble, discarded oil drums and rocket fire, a beautiful young woman (the remarkable Golshifteh Farahani) tends to her older soldier husband, who lies comatose after an honour spat and a bullet wound to the neck. Our suffering heroine can’t leave him, although their home is right on the front line. Outside, marauding militiamen roam the streets, bombs shatter remaining windows and the neighbours are butchered.

The woman duly finds a safer place for her two daughters with an aunt who lives in the north of the ruined city and returns to her wifely duties. Slowly, strangely, her once tyrannical husband, takes on the virtues of a patience stone, a mythical mineral to which woes can be revealed then forgotten. “You’re listening to me,” she says, almost joyfully, “For the first time in 10 years of marriage.”

The wife resolves to tell her husband everything before he dies. And when we say everything, we mean a heck of a lot.

Working from his own novel, director Atiq Rahami and one-time Buñuel screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière have fashioned the year's cleverest smuggling picture. The Patience Stone is set in an unnamed part of Afghanistan, but the austere ruins could just as easily pass for a parallel part of the post-apocalyptic Hunger Games landscape.

Composed in unassuming, tight frames and melancholy monologues, the film quietly takes on grand themes of sex and death and war. Recollections and reminisces cunningly deconstruct sexual, political and religious oppression. What looks, on occasion, like a filmed play becomes increasingly thrilling and eventful. Hold on to your hat for the coming revelations.

The wife's demure manner soon gives way to an increasingly carnal narrative; with hardly any nudity to speak of and only a fraction of the explicit sexual content, The Patience Stone is every bit as erotically charged as the recent lesbian love epic Blue Is the Warmest Colour. The arrival of a stammering, terrified young soldier adds to the blaze.

This is a warzone where gender relations are so diseased and perverted that being a prostitute might just save you from a rapist; where widowhood means getting passed on to a brother; where female infertility means a life of servitude. This is a warzone that the dominant menfolk have engineered. If only they could be left to it.