Taste of Cherry

Ta'm e guilass; drama, Iran / France, 1997; D: Abbas Kiarostami, S: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Safar Ali Moradi
Tehran. Mr. Badii is driving in a car through the streets. He picks up a teenager serving the army and offers him a profitable, but strange job. He drives him up to an isolated hill and explain his job: he should come the next morning to the hole he dug and either help him get up of bury him if he's dead. The youngster gets scared and runs away. Continuing his search, Badii meets an Afghan worker and offers him the same job, explaining he is planning to commit suicide. The man also refuses to do the job due to religious objections. Finally, Badii finds an old Turkish man, Bagheri, who agrees to do the job, but during the ride he explains to him that there are many wonderful things in life worth living for. Confused, Badii goes back to his home. A taxi drives him up to the hole in the middle of a rainy night, and lies in it, thinking. He watches the Moon. The film ends with the director Kiarostami shooting the film.

Winner of the Golden Palm in Cannes, "Taste of Cherry" is a beautiful one-note film, a minimalistic drama reduced to its core message—is life worth living?—that will be loved by those who enjoy films from directors like Jarmusch or Kaurismaki, with a story so touching, so realistic and true that it seems like a quiet therapy from the loud, dumb, obnoxious mainstream/films that really seem off when trying to capture reality. Like most films from Abbas Kiarostami, "Cherry" is also slow and quiet, with static shots and "empty" moments intended for the viewers to "fill in the blanks", and some could find it even inert, but thanks to a tight rhythm and focused point it manages to avoid being monotone, and its humor is rather refreshing. For instance, in the opening shots the main hero Badii (excellent Homayoun Ershadi) is driving a car through the town and picks up a teenage Kurdish soldier. They talk about trivial stuff during their ride for almost 15 minutes, but then Badii offers him a strange, but well paid job and drives him of to an isolated hill ("What is the job?" - "It's not about the job, but about the salary!"). 

Badii stops and shows the soldier a hole, saying his job is to come tomorrow morning at this location and call his name twice, on which he will either respond and he can help him get up, or if he doesn't respond he should berry him with 20 shovels of earth. Either way he will be paid 200,000 Toman. Although Badii is persuading him to do so, the youngster eventually runs away from the car downhill. Obviously, the theme about a man who wants to commit suicide is sharp and daring, a taboo in some societies, and thus Kiarostami could not have said much about Badii's motive due to Iran's restrictive politics at that time. The viewers are never given the reason for his decision, which leaves it mysterious and contemplative. But as a whole, the film is also an essay about the search for a reason to live—the monologue by the old Turkish man near the end about the beauty of life is an amazing lyrical poetry ("We all have problems. If we all chose such a solution, there would be nobody on the world"), since he also wanted to commit suicide, hang himself on a tree, but then tasted a mulberry growing on it and changed his mind. That is the message of the film: little pleasures in life are often disregarded as unimportant, but they all contribute to the richness of life and can give someone the will to live, and thus become important. The metafilm ending is unnecessary, but serves as an interesting "breaking" of the depressive mood. Rarely did such a calm, introverted, slow plot blossom into such an interesting fruit like "Taste of Cherry", a film that gave its soul for every depressed person in the world.

Grade:+++