Taste of Cherry

A sublime and deceptively simple parable about life's possibilities, Abbas Kiarostami' s Palme d'Or winning "Taste of Cherry" follows Mr. Badii, a weary and increasingly desperate middle-aged man who has decided to end his life. Driving through the hilly outskirts of Tehran, in search of someone who will bury him if he succeeds or rescue him if he fails, he meets an assortment of different characters: Afghans, Kurds, Turks, prisoners of the desert, a soldier, a seminary student, and a museum employee, each with their own reason to turn down the job: fear, religious scruples and the humanist's revulsion at a life willfully squandered. A haunting film of piercing intensity, "Taste of Cherry" is told with Kiarostami's incomparable sense of poetry and lyricism. There's no getting around the fact that the movies of Abbas Kiarostami divide audiences in his native Iran, and everywhere else they're shown. Even in France, where his work has probably been celebrated longer than anywhere else. In "Taste of Cherry" the narrative omissions are even more radical and more elemental. To explain why, it is important to discuss everything of consequence that happens in this movie, including the ending.

The film's central character wants to commit suicide, and we don't know why. After a day of deliberation and preparation, we don't even know whether he succeeds. It has been argued that Kiarostami omits this kind of information because he has nothing to say. To counter that, perhaps Kiarostami is speaking with and through us inviting us to share in a collective, common narrative we have to share part of the burden of whether the film is saying anything. If we don't want to play in and with his comedies, such as "Where Is My Friend's House?" and "Through the Olive Trees," we can't expect to have any fun. If we don't want to think about our own deaths and what they might say about our lives or about the possible suicides of strangers and how we might respond to their appeals. "Taste of Cherry" can't have anything to say to us.

The hero in "Taste of Cherry" is a man in his 50's named Mr. Badii, who's driving around the hilly outskirts of Tehran in search of someone who will bury him if he succeeds at committing suicide, he plans to swallow sleeping pills, and retrieve him from the hole in the ground if he fails. Over the course of one afternoon, he picks up three passengers and asks each to perform this task in exchange for money, a young Kurdish soldier stationed nearby, an Afghan seminarian who's somewhat older, and a Turkish taxidermist who's even older. The soldier runs away in fright, the seminarian tries to persuade him not to kill himself, and the taxidermist also tries to change his mind, but reluctantly agrees to the plan because he needs the money to care for his sick child. The terrain Badii's Range Rover traverses repeatedly is mainly parched, dusty, and spotted with ugly construction sites and noisy bulldozers, though the site he selected for his burial is relatively quiet, pristine, and uninhabited. They arrange that the taxidermist will come to the designated hillside at dawn, call Badii's name twice, toss a couple of stones into the hole to make sure he isn't sleeping, and then, if there's no response, shovel dirt over his body and collect the money left for him in Badii's parked car. Later that night, Badii emerges from his apartment, drives in the dark to the appointed spot, and lies down in the hole. We hear the sounds of thunder and rain and the cries of stray dogs, and then the screen goes completely black. In an epilogue, we see Kiarostami at the same location in full daylight, with his camera and sound crew filming soldiers jogging and chanting in the valley below. Homayoun Ershadi, the actor who played Badii, lights and hands Kiarostami a cigarette just before Kiarostami announces that the take is over and they're ready for a sound take. The shot lingers over the wind in the trees, which are now in full bloom, and over the soldiers and filmmakers lounging on the hillside between takes, before the camera pans away to a car driving off into the distance. To the strains of a Louis Armstrong instrumental version of "St. James Infirmary," the final credits come on.

The ending of "Taste of Cherry," unlike everything preceding it, is shot on video, which is part of what makes it startling. Perhaps his reason lies in a statement he made three years ago at a conference in Paris: "I believe in a cinema which gives more possibilities and more time to its viewer, a half-fabricated cinema, an unfinished cinema that is completed by the creative spirit of the viewer, [so that] all of a sudden we have a hundred films."

Most of the dialogue in "Taste of Cherry" occurs between Badii and his three passengers, but none of the actors ever met during the filming, apart from Ershadi and Abdolhossein Bagheri, who plays the Turkish taxidermist (they have a brief second meeting outside the museum where the taxidermist works). Kiarostami filmed each actor alone, sometimes without any of his crew present, sitting in the passenger seat while Ershadi drove or himself driving with one of the other actors as a passenger. Like a novelist inhabiting each of his characters, Kiarostami thus "played" all these people off screen, soliciting on-screen dialogue and reactions from each actor through a series of ruses; when he wanted the actor playing the Kurdish soldier to express amazement, he told me, "I started to speak to him in Czech. At another point, when I wanted him to look afraid, I placed a gun in the glove compartment, and asked him to open it for a chocolate." There's a troubling ambiguity about such methods that interferes with the image of Kiarostami as a "simple" humanist.

Most of Kiarostami's plots are illustrations of simple ideas, especially apparent in his wonderful didactic shorts for children such as, "Two Solutions for One Problem" and "Regularly or Irregularly?" But no less evident in the parable like stories of most of his fiction features. In films as diverse as "The Traveler", "Where Is My Friend's House?", "Life and Nothing More", "Through the Olive Trees", "Taste of Cherry" and even Jafar Panahi's, "The White Balloon" (which Kiarostami "scripted," again without setting pen to paper, by recounting the action into a tape recorder) one invariably finds a central character mulishly obsessed with accomplishing some mission and needing the help of others, who respond with bemusement, indifference, or some manner of assistance. Each mission becomes a kind of fool's progress, and the hero's persistence is usually viewed in comical terms. In "Taste of Cherry", where the mission is the hero's extinction, and the comedy is more subtle, apart from a few lines of the Turkish taxidermist, the tone is atypically somber.

The closest thing Kiarostami has to a visual signature might be termed the cosmic long shot used to humorous and philosophical effect in the closing sequences of "Life and Nothing More" and "Through the Olive Trees", where our distance from the characters and what they're saying turns their destinies into abstract puzzles, spaces to be filled by our intuition and invention. "Taste of Cherry" is punctuated throughout by shots of this kind, including distant overhead shots of Badii's car moving across the hills, usually while he's conversing with a passenger but the sound of their dialogue always remains in the foreground, recalling long-shot-like panels in comic books accompanied by dialogue bubbles. Like the coexistence of private and public space or the frequent framing of landscapes through car windows, this fusion of distance with proximity is part of the way Kiarostami gives enormous weight to the simplest everyday moments.

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Picture source:
http://www.zeitgeistfilm.com/current/tasteofcherry/cherry.html