Taste of Cherry is a 1997 Iranian drama film written, produced and directed by Abbas Kiarostami. It is a minimalist film about a man who drives through a city suburb, in search of someone who can carry out the task of burying him after he commits suicide. It was awarded the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, which it shared with The Eel.
Plot summary
Mr Badii, a middle-aged man, drives through Tehranlooking for someone to do a job for him, and he offers a large amount of money in return. During his drives with prospective candidates, Badii reveals that he plans to kill himself and has already dug the grave. He needs someone to throw earth on his body, after his death. He does not discuss why he wants to commit suicide. His first recruit is a young, shy Kurdish soldier, who refuses to do the job and flees from Badii's car. His second recruit is an Afghanseminarist, who also declines because he has religious objections to suicide. The third is an Azeri taxidermist. He is willing to help Badii because he needs the money for his sick child, but tries to talk him out of it; he reveals that he too wanted to commit suicide a long time ago but chose to live when he tasted mulberries. The Azeri promises to throw earth on Badii if he finds him dead in the morning. That night, Badii lies in his grave while a thunderstorm begins. After a long blackout, the film ends by breaking the fourth wall with camcorder footage of Kiarostami and the film crew filming Taste of Cherry.
The film is minimalist in that it is shot primarily with long takes; the pace is leisurely and there are long periods of ambient sound, which the closing sequence shows the crew recording. Mr. Badii is rarely shown in the same shot as the person he is talking to.
Music
The film does not include a background score, except for the ending titles. This features a trumpet piece, Louis Armstrong's 1929 adaptation of "St. James Infirmary Blues." The only song featured in the film is "Khuda Bowad Yaret" by Afghan singerAhmad Zaher, which is played in the background on a radio.
Release
Taste of Cherry was awarded the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival in the year of its release, tied with Shohei Imamura's The Eel.
Reception
When the film was released in the United States, however, it met with a split reaction among critics and audiences. Roger Ebert wrote a scathing review in The Chicago Sun-Times, giving the film a mere 1 out of 4 stars. Ebert dismissed the film as "excruciatingly boring" and added,
"I understand intellectually what Kiarostami is doing. I am not impatiently asking for action or incident. What I do feel, however, is that Kiarostami's style here is an affectation; the subject matter does not make it necessary, and is not benefited by it. If we're to feel sympathy for Badhi, wouldn't it help to know more about him? To know, in fact, anything at all about him? What purpose does it serve to suggest at first he may be a homosexual? And why must we see Kiarostami's camera crew--a tiresome distancing strategy to remind us we are seeing a movie? If there is one thing Taste of Cherry does not need, it is such a reminder: The film is such a lifeless drone that we experience it only as a movie."
Ebert later went on to add the film to a list of his most hated movies of all time. In his own review of Kiarostami's film, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader awarded it a full four stars. Responding to Ebert's criticisms, Rosenbaum wrote:
"A colleague who finds Taste of Cherry "excruciatingly boring" objects in particular to the fact that we don’t know anything about Badii, to what he sees as the distracting suggestion that Badii might be a homosexual looking for sex, and to what he sees as the tired "distancing strategy" of reminding us at the end that we’re seeing a movie. From the perspective of the history of commercial Western cinema, he has a point on all three counts. But Kiarostami couldn’t care less about conforming to that perspective, and given what he can do, I can’t think of any reason he should care... the most important thing about the joyful finale is that it’s the precise opposite of a "distancing effect." It does invite us into the laboratory from which the film sprang and places us on an equal footing with the filmmaker, yet it does this in a spirit of collective euphoria, suddenly liberating us from the oppressive solitude and darkness of Badii alone in his grave. Shifting to the soldiers reminds us of the happiest part of Badii’s life, and a tree in full bloom reminds us of the Turkish taxidermist’s epiphany — though the soldiers also signify the wars that made both the Kurdish soldier and the Afghan seminarian refugees, and a tree is where the Turk almost hanged himself. Kiarostami is representing life in all its rich complexity, reconfiguring elements from the preceding 80-odd minutes in video to clarify what’s real and what’s concocted. Far from affirming that Taste of Cherry is "only" a movie, this wonderful ending is saying, among other things, that it’s also a movie. And we don’t have to remember all of the lyrics of "St. James Infirmary" to know that death is waiting for us around the corner."
Since the film's release, multiple other critics have also declared it a masterpiece; in the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound poll, six critics and two directors named Taste of Cherry one of the 10 best films ever made.
