Taste of Cherry (1997)

Official trailer

A Film About Why People Keep Living

Taste of Cherry is a film about a man who has decided to end his life, and it’s life-affirming. That sounds like a contradiction, and it’s the heart of what makes the film work. It never lectures and never manipulates. It simply follows a man through one long afternoon of conversations, and lets the world around him make its case.

Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian director, made it in 1997, and it shared the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. It divided critics sharply, and it still does. Some consider it a masterpiece of minimalist cinema. Others find it slow, withholding and baffling. I give it a 9. It asks a lot of its audience, and it gives back something that stays with you for years.

Mr. Badii’s Drive

Mr. Badii, a middle-aged man in a Range Rover, drives slowly through the dusty, hilly construction sites and wastelands on the outskirts of Tehran, looking for someone. We don’t know who, or why. He approaches workers, laborers and passers-by, and offers them money for a job, and they’re suspicious, and he drives on.

Gradually, we learn what he wants. He has dug a hole beside a tree on a hillside, and he plans to lie in it that night and end his life. He wants someone to come in the morning, call his name, and if he answers, help him out. If he doesn’t, they’re to bury him. He will pay a large sum of money for this simple, terrible task.

Kiarostami never tells us why. We never learn what has brought Badii to this point: no illness, no loss, no crisis is explained. Homayoun Ershadi plays him with a calm, weary gravity, and his silence about his reasons becomes the film’s central mystery and its point. The film is about what might make him want to live.

The Soldier

Badii’s first serious candidate is a young Kurdish soldier, shy and poor, walking back to his barracks.

Badii gives him a lift and gradually, gently, explains what he wants. The soldier is horrified. He’s a farm boy, far from home, and he wants nothing to do with it. He’s frightened of the task and of the man in the driver’s seat, whose calm is somehow more unsettling than anger would be.

The scene is long, slow and almost unbearably tense. Badii is kind and persuasive, and the soldier is polite and frightened, and as the car winds through the hills, the boy grows more and more uneasy until he finally jumps out and runs away down the slope.

I find it the most frightening scene in the film, and nobody in it raises a voice. When the boy bolts, I’m relieved for him.

It also sets the pattern for everything that follows. Badii isn’t trying to frighten anyone, and he isn’t cruel. He’s simply asking strangers to share a burden he can’t carry alone, and each of them has to decide how to answer. The film is built from those answers.

The Seminarian

The second passenger is an Afghan seminarian, a young man studying religion, who is working as a guard at a construction site. He refuses on religious grounds, and he and Badii have a long, courteous argument about faith, suffering and whether a person has the right to end their own life.

The seminarian offers the reasons of his religion, and Badii listens politely and is unmoved. The conversation is two thoughtful people talking past each other, and Kiarostami lets it unfold in real time, with no music and no editing tricks, just faces and voices in a car.

It’s the film’s most intellectual conversation, and in some ways its least effective. That seems deliberate. Badii can’t be argued out of his despair, however reasonable the arguments. Something other than reasoning will be needed, and the next passenger brings it. This is the stretch where the film loses me a little. I understand why Kiarostami wants the argument to fail, and I still think the scene runs long for a point it makes in its first few minutes. It’s the only part of the film I’d trim.

The Taxidermist

The third passenger is where the film turns. Mr. Bagheri, an elderly Turkish taxidermist who works at a natural history museum, agrees to help, because he needs the money for his sick child. He’s not happy about it, and he makes that clear. But as they drive through the hills in the late afternoon light, he begins to talk, and then he tells Badii a story.

Years ago, he says, he too decided to end his life. He went out at dawn to a mulberry tree to do it, and while he was there, he tasted a mulberry, and then another, and the sun came up, and children passed and asked him to shake the tree so they could eat the fruit, and he went home with mulberries for his wife. He changed his mind because of the taste of a mulberry.

He talks about the beauty of the world: the sunrise, the moon, the stars, the taste of fruit.

He asks Badii whether he really wants to give up the taste of cherries. It’s the core of the film, and it comes as a story told by a kind old man who has been exactly where Badii is, with no sermon attached. I think the mulberry story is the finest monologue Kiarostami ever put on film, and it’s the heart of why I rate this so high.

The Car

Almost the whole film takes place in Badii’s car, and Kiarostami films it in long, patient takes, from inside and outside the vehicle, often with only one person visible in the frame.

The style is famously minimal. The achievement, technical and emotional, is extraordinary. The car becomes a confessional, a small closed space where strangers say things they would never say face to face.

Kiarostami often shot the conversations with the two actors filmed separately, sometimes with himself in the driver’s seat off camera, speaking the other character’s lines, so that each actor was responding to him. The result feels spontaneous and intimate, and the actors, several of them non-professionals, give natural, unforced performances.

The landscape matters too. The dusty yellow hills, the construction sites, the earth-moving machines and the endless winding roads create a world that seems half-finished and barren, and it reflects Badii’s state of mind without the film ever saying so. Only at the very end, in the spring footage, does the land turn green, and the change is startling after ninety minutes of dust.

The Ending

After his conversation with Bagheri, Badii seems to hesitate.

He drives back to the taxidermist’s museum to find him, and reminds him to call his name loudly in the morning, and to throw stones at him in case he’s only sleeping. Then night falls, and Badii goes to the hillside and lies down in the hole he has dug. A storm gathers. The screen goes black.

Then, suddenly, the film cuts to grainy video footage of the film crew on the same hillside in daylight, spring green, with Kiarostami and his crew and the actor who played Badii, smoking a cigarette, alive and well. Soldiers march in the distance. Louis Armstrong’s St. James Infirmary plays. The film ends.

Few endings in cinema are as debated. Some viewers find it a cheat, breaking the spell just when the story reaches its climax. Others find it deeply moving. It tells them that this is a film, that life continues and that spring comes. The question of whether Badii lived matters less than the world going on. I find it overwhelming.

The Controversy

The film’s subject was sensitive in Iran, and Kiarostami faced difficulties with the authorities before it could be shown at Cannes. It arrived at the festival at the last minute and went on to share the Palme d’Or with Shohei Imamura’s The Eel. It was the first time an Iranian film had won the festival’s top prize.

Critics were sharply divided. Roger Ebert famously gave it one star, calling it excruciatingly boring. Many others called it a great film. It has remained a famously divisive great film, a test case in what audiences expect from cinema and how much patience they’re willing to give. That’s a film that reveals as much about its viewers as about itself.

Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami was a major filmmaker of his generation, and Taste of Cherry is among his finest works, alongside Close-Up, Where Is the Friend’s House? and The Wind Will Carry Us. His films blur the line between fiction and documentary, use non-professional actors and long takes, and often reflect on the act of filmmaking itself.

The ending of Taste of Cherry is a perfect example of that. By stepping outside the story, he asks the audience to think about what they’ve just watched and why. He died in 2016, and his influence on world cinema, especially on directors interested in realism and simplicity, has been enormous.

A Note on the Subject

It deals directly with a man who wants to die, and it takes that seriously. It never makes his despair glamorous, and it never offers easy answers. This is a film that treats a person in crisis with patience and respect. It sets against his despair the ordinary, stubborn beauty of the world.

For anyone who has felt the way Badii feels, the film’s central message, delivered through Bagheri’s mulberries, is gentle and powerful: that small things, a sunrise, a taste, a child’s request, can be enough to change a mind. It doesn’t pretend that’s a solution. It suggests it’s a beginning, and it trusts its audience to understand the difference.

Craft Note

How well does Taste of Cherry (1997) hold up?

Yes, with patience. It’s a 9, a slow, spare, deep film about despair and the reasons to keep living, and I’d put it among the great films of world cinema. The only thing keeping it off a 10 for me is that seminarian stretch, and the mulberry story and that baffling, beautiful ending more than pay for it. Give it your full attention, and it may stay with you for the rest of your life.

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