FILM SCREENING - TASTE OF CHERRY & DISCUSSION
The first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or, this austere, emotionally complex drama
by the great Abbas Kiarostami follows the middle-aged Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi)
as he drives around the hilly outskirts of Tehran looking for someone who will agree to dispose of his body after he commits suicide, a taboo under Islam.
Extended conversations with three passengers (a soldier, a seminarian, and a taxidermist) elicit different views of mortality and individual choice. Operating at once as a closely observed, realistic story and a fable populated by archetypal figures, Taste of Cherry challenges the viewer to consider what often goes unexamined in everyday life.
In Abbas Kiarostami’s universe, it might be said, there are no things, only relations between things. Likewise, in his cinema: no films, only relations between films—and within them. And between them and us.
Three and one. The most celebrated of Iran’s great directors, Kiarostami built his international reputation with a trio of features made near Koker, a village in northwestern Iran: Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987) concerns a journey of friendship made by a little boy; And Life Goes On (aka Life and Nothing More, 1992) fictionalizes a journey that Kiarostami himself made to discover if the child actors of the previous film were killed in a devastating 1990 earthquake; and Through the Olive Trees (1994), in fictionalizing the filming of And Life Goes On, ponders the difficulties faced by people who survived that quake. Critics have dubbed these films the “Koker Trilogy.” Kiarostami resists the designation, noting the films are connected only by the “accident” of place. He has suggested it might be more appropriate to consider as a trilogy the latter two titles plus Taste of Cherry (1997), since these, he says, are connected by a theme: the preciousness of life.
One and three. Unlike the two preceding films, which movingly convey an instinctual thirst for survival, Taste of Cherry gives us “the preciousness of life” via what might be called a rhetorical inversion. At first glance it seems to privilege death. The most dour and constricted of Kiarostami’s films, with a tightly scripted feel that contrasts so notably with the spontaneous, lyrical moods of Life and Olive Trees, it follows a fiftyish, apparently healthy and well-off Tehrani named Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) as he cruises the city’s outskirts in his Range Rover trying to find a stranger who will help him commit suicide. (He doesn’t want the accomplice to kill him, merely to return to the site the next day and rescue him if his own efforts haven’t succeeded, bury him if they have.) Most of the film is given to conversations he has with three men he thus importunes:
a young, Kurdish soldier who is spooked by the creepy request;
a middle-aged, Afghani seminarian who’s unable to dissuade Badii with religious sympathy;
and an avuncular Turk who works as a taxidermist at a natural history museum and who urges the glories of nature—the taste of cherries, say—as the prime reason not to kill oneself. He, though, reluctantly agrees to assist Badii.
Clearly insufficient as significant anecdote or standard drama, the film’s spare narrative has the opaque, insinuating allure of allegory, or veiled confession. That, during filming, Kiarostami himself occupied the off-camera seat in every conversation we see, suggests the filmmaker revisiting his own struggles with inner darkness. Yet if we read the seminarian as “religion” and the taxidermist as “natural philosophy” we glimpse a debate that galvanized Iranian philosophers of the Middle Ages, and, in Kiarostami’s handling, can be parsed as a subtle argument against theocracy. Or, perhaps this is another Kiarostamian film-about-film, with Badii standing for a fading form of auteur cinema whose final act is its own erasure.
The interpretations cut in so many directions because the elements are so simple, yet their arrangement is so intricately, seductively suggestive. Why does the film not tell us why Badii wants to kill himself (perhaps because what it really concerns is why he, or anyone, would want to live)? Why does it oddly pose suicide as involving more than one person (which is actually true of life)? Here, seeing begins in asking.
With his great formal and intellectual acuity, Kiarostami stands at the forefront of a tradition that includes Bresson, Bergman, Godard, Kurosawa, and Antonioni. Yet Taste of Cherry, the first Iranian film to capture the Palme d’Or at Cannes, will leave no sympathetic viewer becalmed in mere cinephilic admiration. In its penultimate scene, when the figure we’ve identified all along is lying completely still, apparently heading into a darkness both literal and figurative, we’re left utterly alone with ourselves, with our own deepest feelings about the profoundly simple thing that, above all, this film wants us to sense, to savor, to taste: life.
And nothing more.
- Godfrey Cheshire, Criterion Collection
In a post of at least 300 words, please answer the following questions pertaining to Taste of Cherry and and other historical film movements such as neorealism:
Please choose a scene from Taste of Cherry and discuss
1)one aspect of Kiarostami's formal style in relation to other movements
we have studied thus far.
2) Neorealism is an obvious influence, but you may notice traits from other countries,
films, and time periods we have studied.
3)You can discuss any aspect of the film's style:
performance,
editing (or lack thereof),
cinematography,
mise-en-scene,
sound,
absence of music etc.
Please embed a still from your chosen scene or YouTube clip from Taste of Cherry in your post. Please choose a scene that someone from your group has not already discussed.
My Essay
National Cinemas Post 1968: Russia, Iran, Spain: Film History
The overall beautiful cinematographic experience and feel of the film Taste of Cherry (1997) reminded me of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). In both pictures the landscape is an essential character in the story. The story is set around the landscape.
In this picture you can see the beautiful golden earth in Iran and to what looks to me like it is filmed during the ‘magic hour’ of filming, a signature style of Terrence Malick. We are not looking at golden wheat but the land has a golden sheen.
Here’s a similar shot in Days of Heaven.
Another characteristic of Malick’s is to not lose the landscape but also have close takes of the characters speaking. Both films (mainly in Taste of Cherry) have natural sounds, the nature or the car driving on the road. The pacing was slower as seems fitting with farming or terrain with a lot of ground to cover. The pacing fits the simplicity of life in both films.
The films both also show a social structure in place. The Farmer is wealthy and hires the poor migrants to work on his farm. He dresses well with a top hat and has a huge house. Similarly, Mr. Badii’s is of a higher social class and drives an expensive Range Rover he is interested in hiring someone who looks like they need money. He is dressed in stylish khaki pants and a sporty pullover.
When Mr. Badii is looking for a person to employ, he was snobbish as a wealthier man in a higher class would be and dismissive of the first two characters the Kurdish soldier and the seminarist. To the soldier he says I was in the military too but a higher rank and referring to him as poor and being sure he needs the money. To the seminarist he dismisses that if he wanted life advice, he go to a more qualified seminarian. He also dismisses him as an Afghani, why are there so many here? The farmer is not blatantly like this, except for Abby, it doesn’t appear he gets to know and friend the lower-class migrants.
Both the main characters are headed toward death.
I know these comparisons are director and film specific. There are characteristics that are similar in the two movements. The Hollywood Renaissance had an “offbeat antihero protagonist”; the films were more psychological; There is a mix of comedic and serious; unconventional film styles were used; films were shot on location and films were recognized by the director.
Taste of Cherry shows these characteristics in the offbeat antihero protagonist of Mr. Badii. The film is deeply psychological about depression, the ethics of suicide and the philosophy of life. The comedic moments are few in Taste of Cherry, but were quite funny. The first was when Mr. Badii meets a man collecting plastic bags to turn them in for money. The man is poor and in rags, but he is wearing a UCLA sweatshirt. Is it a humorous nod to Hollywood? I think so. Another is when Mr. Badii is offered an omelet and he says that he can’t eat it because it is bad for his health. Well, he’s dying at the end of the day. There is also the joke out of nowhere about the broken finger. The film was all on location and not sets. The unconventional open ending and also breaking the fourth wall were used. The film has distinct director's style of it being a Kiarostami film.
Hello Ida,
I love that you compared Days of Heaven to Taste of Cherry. The cinematography is definitely similar, and the setting is so important for both films. It is almost like the setting becomes a character as well. I also liked your last paragraph in which you explain the comedy surrounding the film. I did not get some of them, so reading it from you was exciting and educational. And lastly, I believe that the style is quite similar to the Hollywood Reinassance era. You are always doing a great job!
Response from Don Gonzalez:
I'm impressed Ida when you noticed the differences in the societal structure especially with regards to the characters' mode of clothing and the car he is using (i.e., "top hat, stylish khaki pants, and a sporty pullover, Range Rover.") Come to think of it, he really projects an image that he is well off, and is probably rich. That he's targeted working class people and the way they trust him (by riding in his car without question) convinces us that he is also a smooth talker.
Also have to agree that "Hollywood Renaissance had an 'offbeat antihero protagonist'" and the films were more "psychological." The way that the story is mostly driven by dialogue instead of visuals also help us get inside the minds of the characters. It may appear spoon feeding as film is really a visual medium but since the setting happens mostly inside the car, we are prone to listen - and listen with depth.
Response from Cecillia Chu:
Ida - I really appreciate you bringing up the class issues between the characters. I thought it was interesting how Mr. Badii would bring up the issue of the money when trying to convince the people to do the job for him. And how despite the clearly astronomical sum that he was offering, the first two people he approached still wanted nothing to do with what he was asking. It really hinted at a lot of underlying cultural and class issues which I think really went over my head.
Quiz:
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