The Patience Stone

The Afghanistan feature, Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone, examines that understudied thesis: Islamic terrorism is rooted in a repressed and perverted sexuality. The rhetoric of politics and religion are a false front. As the heroine’s worldly aunt remarks, the men who make war can’t make love. 

Though the film is based on Rahimi’s novel, its sexual and moral paradoxes smack of the films coscripter Jean-Claude Carriere wrote with Bunuel. The terrorist officers are proud to rape virgins but refuse to rape a whore. That saves the virtuous heroine (Golshifteh Farahani). Conversely, the young soldier who approaches her as a whore is the first man to treat her with respect and affection. As the victim of his commander’s sadism he empathizes with the supposed whore. The woman who personifies the will and capacity to survive is the prostitute aunt. That fate awaits the heroine’s two young daughters -- if they are lucky enough to survive the male world of war. The reversals are as surreal as the bombed landscape.    

The central marriage is totally aberrant. The young girl was by arrangement both engaged and married to the terrorist hero in absentia. As a lover he’s even more absent when he’s there. His “love” making is brutish and violent. The closest the woman comes to a happy relationship with him is when he lies comatose and she can for the first time unburden herself of her secrets. After ten years of silence and misery she comes to like him when he ostensibly listens to her. For the first time she has a voice. For the first time she can express herself. For the first time he can not spurn her kisses and caresses. The confession that breaks through, that returns him to life, is her revelation that because he is sterile she arranged for another man to sire his two daughters. The woman needed to procreate to sustain the marriage. When he returns to himself his impulse is to kill her. Again male violence is rooted in a perverse concept of masculinity.  

The film aims for a kind of essential universality by not naming the booming invasive war (Afghanistan? Iraq? ) and by not naming the key characters: the woman, the aunt, the young soldier. The Persian legend in the title is the syngue sabour, a magic stone that bears the speaker’s pain and suffering, a kind of mineral scapegoat. Here the comatose husband collects his wife’s disclosures until his vanity cracks and he erupts back to his normal brutishness. His mineral state was superior to his animal.