Kevin’s review published on Letterboxd:
"Those who do not know how to make love, make war."
A patience stone according to Afghan folklore is a stone that people can pour out their troubles, their hopes, their fears, their dreams and their secrets to. Once the stone has absorbed all the pain and suffering it breaks into a million pieces and the persons burden is no more.
Golshifteh Farahani stars in a film from Afghanistan director/novelist Atiq Rahimi as 'The Woman' who takes on the role of nursing her husband after he has been shot in the neck and paralysed.
The Woman, the mother of 2 young girls, confides to her husband her lost ambitions, her burdens and secrets that she has kept during the marriage, to what is a much older man. She is in fact using her husband as a patience stone.
This is a deeply moving and absorbing study of an Afghan woman who's marriage was arranged to a man who she never loved and who never showed her anything in the way of tenderness and affection.
It's a story about gender relationships and its a story about the brutal and controlling nature of a male orientated society and a belief system that pays no heed to the needs, wants and desires of its woman.