"Taste of Cherry" (Language - Persian) (1997) - Movie Review

Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry” is a minimalistic film with abstraction and mundane chores of unpredictable life in a practiced rhythm of unnerving happenings for a man named Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) driving his car. He is hiring for a job most of us would refuse, some of us would give it a thought to refuse and some accept the offer for the situation and the money it is going to pay. He is going to kill himself in a remote land of sand and open light of sun and moon where in a hole he has found to lay himself down. The person he is hunting for does not need to assist the suicide but cover him with earth to have some sort of an unofficial burial for his buried soul. And he offers a huge compensation for this aid.

In its artistic independence, it takes long shots with no dialogues and in a poetic manner brings in the bland life in a barren land but with a situation not a person would encounter in a day to day happenings. What it does though in the end is the white space in a dark screen of laying pale and staring stupid. The poetry though in multiple scenes does not make it a poetic film. It depends on its vagueness of a man whom we do not know and reason for his meandering search for a person to help him in his post death oddly does not seem to concern us. It should as we would expect as the demise of a fellow human making us emotional is what makes us human. Yet the judgments we do not make of him and his reasoning becomes the nullifying force in identifying with Badii.

The reasons for his decision are not explained and he keeps it to himself. He talks logic and reasoning for his decision of death and the assistance he needs to three people he manages to get in his car to ride on. Two of them are silent while he speaks. The third person, an old professor (Abdolrahman Bagheri) is the embodiment of the film. A Kurdish soldier (Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari) freaks out and in fact sits there in the pool of awkwardness and creepiness seeing this man commanding, requesting and reasoning for asking his help in something he looks out for guidance from religious conscience. The second person, a seminarian (Mir Hossein Noori) quits out based on again religion. Both though honestly denies on the basis of conscience but needs a more solid proof to put forward to Badii in order for him to get out of this decision.

The old professor is the one who talks out his experience and tries to get Badii out of this. He tries desperately to get Badii to speak and requests to let it out. This conversation or to be precise the one sided speech from him is the film’s center piece to reflect and represent the concept of outlook and the experience of rejoicing the life we have. But as much as it shoots a sandy barren land with stones and machines digging up and covering a physical body in its way through its gaseous wandering into the atmosphere, it troubles in the placidity of its central character. A man not fully in conviction with his emotional outlet but firmly believes in the solution of taking his life. He is vacillating and Ershadi gives the blankness Badii needs but it is an absence of confide and care.

Movies like this do not beg plot but offers the dimension of the uneventful life and find a beauty in its routine. While Tarkovsky’s films try to say that in a tone of his and my latest incomplete viewing of Bel Tarr’s “Satantango” follows the same, they are a total detachment from the reality of life itself. I do not stare twenty seconds at some one to carry a conversation and if the other does, I freak out. Even in this unsatisfying movie there is a snatch of the reality from the outdoors of the nearby hill and a road untraveled but for reasons I cannot explain well, Tarkovsky takes a high stand on an artificial sterility in his images. There is a brutal denial of the life we see it and gives an alternate reality of artificial boredom. In Kiarostami’s world I would like to wonder on the nature’s offering of limitless sky and an attractive picture of reasonable expression of a driving person or a person thinking within the limits of widened air around them. I believe the world of Kiarostami, because they indeed are real. “Taste of Cherry” is not a master piece or it is not a good movie in its genre but the believability of it cannot be questioned at all.