Film: Taste Of Cherry
Year of production: 1997
UK Release date: 27th June 2011
Distributor: Artificial Eye
Certificate: 15
Running time: 98 mins
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Starring: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Safar Ali Moradi, Mir Hossein Noori
Genre: Drama
Format: DVD
Country of Production: Iran/France
Language: Persian
Review by: Karen Rogerson
Released as part of The Abbas Kiarostami Collection. The most celebrated Iranian director of the late 20th century, Abbas Kiarostami’s film career began in the early 1970s. With a largely non professional cast, and shot almost entirely using a camera fixed in a car, Taste of Cherry deliberately retains the simplicity of the self-taught Kiarostami’s early works.
In the outskirts of Tehran, a man circles the streets in his Land Rover with apparent aimlessness, cut off from the hubbub of the crowds outside, ignoring appeals from labourers surrounding the car asking if he wants to hire workers. Eventually, the man’s purpose is revealed.
In the dusty hills circling the city, he has dug a grave in the hillside. That evening, he intends to take his entire stash of sleeping pills, lie down in the ground and wait to die. He’s trying to find a stranger who will agree to come to the grave the next morning and call out his name to see if he is still alive. If he is, the man must help him out of the grave; if he has died, the man must shovel dirt into the grave to cover his body.
The driver, identified only as Mr Badii, is offering a generous financial reward for this task. The men he encounters are dispossessed, immigrant workers earning meagre wages, scavenging rubbish heaps for plastic bags to resell, enduring the loneliness and tedium of guarding a deserted construction site, or far from home and drafted into the service of the army. But despite the promise of money, it’s no easy task for Badii to find someone to help him. His proposal is met with fear and unease from some, and compassion but moral objection from others.
The film takes place over the course of one day and its following, decisive night, centring upon Badii’s search and composed almost entirely of shots within his car and of its progress through the hills…
With no music, save for the opening and closing titles, the film is soundtracked by the gentle crunch of the car’s wheels on gravel as Badii cruises the bare roads of the barren, dusty hills surrounding the city. This monotony is broken by the occasional cry of a wild bird, the sounds of traffic, the racket of a construction site, or the far off barking of a dog. The colourlessness of the soundtrack is matched by the dusty bleakness of its landscape. Towards the film’s end, the sudden injection of colour in shots of trees turned to gold by the late evening light and the dramatic contrast of a thunderstorm over the hillside at night give a last minute suggestion of vitality which may or may not indicate some renewed attachment to life on the part of Badii.
The predominance of shots filmed on a fixed camera within the car is characteristic of Kiarostami’s filmmaking. He has spoken of the particular quality this device lends to personal interaction – “I have a very intimate sense when I am in a car with someone next to me...silence doesn’t seem heavy or difficult.” Badii and the strangers he talks to in the car always appear separately on the screen, emphasising the isolation between them, as well as the peculiar intimacy in which the dialogues take place.
Homayoun Ershadi’s performance as Mr Badii is grave and dignified, expressive of depression’s blank eyed lack of reaction to life - and to others - and the way it can obscure the possibility of hope. At the same time, Badii is able to empathise with the loneliness and aspirations of the men that he meets, even if these interchanges become increasingly mechanical and desperate as his search goes on. Abdolrahman Bagheri also shines as the harsh voiced but compassionate Turkish stranger who relates his own story of a confrontation with despair, a tale which has the quality of a fable in its simplicity and lack of moralising.
Taste Of Cherry examines one man’s dark night of the soul, and the lack of any explanation for Badii’s choice of suicide lends the film a sense of abstraction which makes the story that of any man battling between despair and the sense of life’s preciousness. A moral debate goes on in the film about the nature of suicide, whether self destruction is as great a sin as murder, or whether perhaps unhappiness itself and the pain it causes others is a greater wrong. The repeated appeal to the successive strangers for help has the quality of a religious parable, as each man’s response reveals his own beliefs about the nature of compassion for his fellow man, and whether the most compassionate act could be to help that man towards his own destruction with some dignity.
Despite the artfully crafted naturalism of its style and the realistic and quietly affecting performances of its cast, Taste Of Cherry is as bleak as its subject. Its repetitive shots of the Land Rover creeping along the hillside roads – in some cases, they look as if they have been literally reused – creates a mood of numb blankness. This is probably a deliberate device to evoke the colourless nature of the world seen through the viewpoint of Badii’s despair, but this visual blandness and the incredibly slow pace make the film hard to engage with, seeming longer than its hour-and-a-half duration. Taste Of Cherry’s creeping pace and uncomfortable silences – however deliberately meant – don’t do credit to the best scenes, which appear towards the film’s end (in which I don’t include its controversial final scene).
Taste Of Cherry is an artful piece of filmmaking, showcasing Kiarostami’s work’s characteristic qualities of naturalism, lack of sentimentality and a refusal to overegg the drama of a simple plot for the sake of manipulating the audience’s emotions. Cleverly constructed, it won critical acclaim and the Palme d’Or in 1997, but its cleverness doesn’t make it the easiest film to like. KR
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