`Taste of Cherry,” the Iranian film that shared the Grand Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a spare, sharply focused drama about an ultimate question: whether to live or die. Its central character, Mr. Badii, is a nervous-looking man in a van who keeps picking up hitchhikers in the hill roads outside Tehran and asking them for help. His request is always the same: He wants someone to accompany him to the outdoor site where he intends to kill himself by overdosing on sleeping pills and then return the next day to bury him.
Badii offers all of them — a soldier, worker, seminarian and an old taxidermist — money. They all could probably use it, yet they tend to turn him down — some out of fear, others seemingly out of appreciation for the life their driver is anxious to end. The taxidermist in particular counters Badii’s pessimism by recounting his own attempted suicide. Trying to hang himself, he was aroused by the scent of mulberries — a flash of sensuality that, like the taste of cherries, reminds him of life’s sweetness.
“Taste of Cherry,” which takes place just during the day Badii tries to recruit his accomplice, is a simple movie. But it’s magnificently simple. The director, Iran’s great and neglected master, Abbas Kiarostami, doesn’t tackle the subject with the exaggerated pathos you might expect. He doesn’t want us to cry for Badii or fear for his bewildered riders but instead to closely observe what they’re going through. Much of “Taste of Cherry” unfolds with such bewitching spontaneity and unpredictability, it almost seems like a psychological suspense film or a cinema verite set in an exotic locale.
Through it all, “Taste of Cherry” — like almost all of Kiarostami’s 25 or so works since his 1970 debut — has an irresistible feeling of truth. Scene after scene seems to have been made up as they went along. And some of them obviously were.
Part of Kiarostami’s talent stems from his unique background and training. He began making films, short and long, in 1970 for the filmmaker’s section of Iran’s Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults — which he himself had helped found. And many of his movies are about such seemingly prosaic subjects as getting children to do their homework and observe good dental hygiene. Even so, all the Kiarostami films I’ve seen have that same breath of life.
Kiarostami remains an esoteric taste for most of the general public, and “Taste of Cherry” is a difficult film in some respects. In others, though, it is universal and transparent. Kiarostami’s subject here is all of humanity. This is not a movie about children but about adults at the end of their tether, adults entering again into a childlike state of fear and anxiety.
Watching “Taste of Cherry” and following its path of fear and redemption, living through this strange day with these foreign but utterly recognizable and deeply sympathetic characters, we believe in them. We feel with them. We care what happens to them. And, knowing them, we know a bit more, as well, about ourselves.
”TASTE OF CHERRY”
(star) (star) (star) (star)
Directed, produced, written and edited by Abbas Kiarostami; photographed by Homayoun Payvar; sound by Jehangir Mirshekari, Mohammad Reza Delpak. A Zeitgeist Films release; opens Friday at The Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:35. No MPAA rating (family, with caution; deals with suicide).
THE CAST
Mr. Badii ……………… Homayoun Ershadi
The Taxidermist ………… Abdolhossein Bagheri
The Worker …………….. Afshin Bakhtiari
The Soldier ……………. Ali Moradi
The Seminarian …………. Hossein Noori
The Factory Guard ………. Ahmad Ansari
