Review: ‘The Patience Stone’

An ancient Persian story urges a person with a heart filled with sorrow to find a ‘patience’ stone. The stone will listen to your problems and grievances until it can hold no more, and explode into pieces that lift the weight from your shoulders and set you free. It is this tale that forms the basis for Atiq Rahami’s 2008 novel, and this film made of it.

Set in an unnamed Afghani city besieged by the Taliban, the film centres on an unnamed woman, wife and mother.  With her husband comatose after a bullet wound to the neck, she spends her days caring for him. Her two daughters also need care but with no food, water, electricity or money, things look grim. Apart from the comatose husband, no menfolk are around. It’s not explicitly stated but it’s evident that they are probably at war somewhere. There are no relatives left, except an aunt who it turns out is working as a prostitute.

Occasionally, wrapped in her burkha, the wife steps outside the house’s gates and makes her way through streets where gunfire and explosions are everyday occurrences and where the Taliban ride through on jeeps, machine guns at the ready to exterminate whole families on a whim.

It’s safer to stay inside the house, sitting by her inert husband and using him as her patience stone. As the days go by, she dissects the life she and her husband had together. Married at seventeen when her husband was away at war, she was forced to endure a ceremony in which he was represented by sword. Now after ten years, he’s still never kissed her or shown any interest or curiosity about her. They have two children, yet there is no indication that sex has ever given her anything resembling pleasure. It’s not until she takes matters into her own hands and sells herself to a young soldier that she experiences pleasure.

While undeniably grim, this film masterfully shows us the reality of Afghan women – that they are lowliest of the low and at the mercy of the men around them. Farahani’s character has never known a life without misery, and because she’s poor as well as being a woman, she’s never had any hope of changing her situation. But she’s survived and will continue to, whether or not her husband – the patience stone who now carries the burden of her sorrows – wakes up or not.

6/10

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