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Avg. Rating: 4
Superb
An impassive, middle-aged man drives through the busy urban traffic of the city, and is approached by several day laborers for hire. He has a specific task in mind, but drives away without saying a word. His name is Mr. Badii (Homayon Ershadi), and he is seeking an assistant for his planned suicide. He stops to ask strangers about their financial state, surreptitiously interviewing them for the reprehensible job, but leaves without declaring his intentions. He offers a ride to a young soldier (Safar Ali Moradi) on his way back to the barracks. An overhead crane shot follows their vehicle weaving through the narrow, unpaved roads as he drives the soldier to a remote basin where he has dug his burial plot at the foot of a tree. He sees a filial bond with the soft-spoken young man, having himself served in the military, and Mr. Badii reveals his plan: the next day, he asks that the soldier call to him twice. If he responds, the soldier will save him (and literally help him out of the hole that he has dug for himself). If he does not answer, then the soldier will throw twenty spadefuls of earth into the hole and bury him. The young man is horrified by his plan, and runs away. Mr. Badii then begins to follow an earth-moving vehicle and ends up at a closed cement factory occupied by a security guard (Ahmad Ansari) and a seminarist (Hossein Noori) on holiday. He attempts to recruit the religious man by appealing to his compassion, but to no avail. Instead, the gentle seminarist offers him a receptive ear and teachings from the Koran. Disappointed, he leaves the factory and comes upon a construction site, stopping to rest. Note the juxtaposition of Mr. Badii's shadow against the pouring soil. Eventually, he offers a ride to a talkative old man named Mr. Bagheri (Abdolhossein Bagheri) who works at the museum of natural history. Coincidentally, years earlier, Mr. Bagheri had attempted to commit suicide, but was inspirited by the presence of mulberries under his feet. He disapproves of Mr. Badii's plan, but his son's illness compels him to accept the regrettable assignment.
Abbas Kiarostami creates a visually austere and serenely contemplative examination of life in A Taste of Cherry: the unchanging, barren scenery outside the car window; the desolate, winding roads leading to the burial plot; the suffocating dust of the construction site. The barren, almost monochromatic landscape serves as a metaphor for the isolation of the soul. In essence, A Taste of Cherry is not about a man's search for death, but his search for a reason for living. By rejecting the laborers (who are undoubtedly qualified to bury him) in favor of his passengers, he is seeking empathy and connection. In the end, a chromatic shift transforms the empty landscape into a lush countryside. Perhaps, Mr. Badii, like Mr. Bagheri before him, has changed his own perspective.
brilliant, but hard to watch
I have a favorable opinion of this movie, though it was tough to watch, and I probably will never watch it again.
Most of this movie consists of close-up shots of a guy driving around a quarry near Tehran trying to find somebody who will help him kill himself.
There are so many touches of this movie that reveal the hand of a master. It's almost like watching that LandRover drive interminably around that dusty quarry for an hour and a half will have you mulling over suicide yourself! And the fact that the man's reasons are never offered was brilliant, brilliant.
Yes, the premise is brilliant, but I think it worked a lot better as a script idea than a finished product. It is still more than watchable, however.
In other news:
1. This movie has got to feature the most unexpected, mind-bending ending I've ever seen in a film! The second you see it, you'll bound off to the internet to ascertain if there is a physical problem with your DVD.
2. Whoever did the subtitles: good job. They're literate, and the translations are spot-on. Seems like this isn't very common with Iranian films that make it to the West.
A movie that comes close to meditation
This movie changed my thoughts about what cinema can do. It is as close to a mindfullness meditation - vipassana- as as movie can be. It is a very long, at times frustrating movie, but the rewards of watching are very rich are long lasting.
Strongly urge anyone with a meditative bent of mind to view it.
Good
There is the old, and often neglected, nostrum about `gilding the lily.' I was reminded of this watching Abbas Kiarostami's acclaimed 1997 film Taste Of Cherry (Ta'm E Guilass), co-winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, for while it comes close to being a great film for the bulk of its running time of 99 minutes (not the oft-claimed 95 minutes), its much discussed ending, of breaking the fourth wall (ala Ingmar Bergman, circa the 1960s) to reveal what has just been witnessed is all a film, is one of the worst endings for a film of quality I've seen; perhaps even worse than the tacked on uplifting ending to Akira Kurosawa's otherwise stellar Rashomon. The basic problem with the ending is that, unlike in Bergman's run of self-conscious films (Persona, Hour Of The Wolf, Shame), the big `revelation' that the film is a film comes after we've sat through it; assuming that even such a fourth wall braking could surprise one in these times. Even worse is that it undermines the penultimate scene, which is a better- if not great ending, but one which would arguably qualify Taste Of Cherry as a great film overall. And it is an all Kiarostami film, good or bad, as he produced, wrote, and edited, as well as directed it.
Critics, pro and con, have prattled on about Kiarostami's meaning or intent, in regard to the videotaped, not filmed, ending of verdant hills (contrasting with the rest of the film's ruddy barren rock landscapes), but always seem to miss the result, which is that it emotionally deflates the whole story. They claim things such as Kiarostami's abnegation of preachiness, a disdain for tearjerking, some psychological reason why the reveal of the film's fictive nature, at its end, is profound, or his desire to make indeterminacy the film's major motif. Yet, before the ending of the film, it is not preachy, jerks no tears, is clearly fictive, and the penultimate scene spells out indeterminacy far more powerfully and cogently than the ending does. When confronted by such realities as this it is always amusing to watch fans of an artist alibi for failure when the simplest answer is simply failure- that Kiarostami did not believe enough in his film to let it end at its best point. And what the filmmaker desired to achieve, if any aside from himself could divine such a thing, is immaterial to the viewer.
Taste Of Cherry has moments of rapturous almost pure cinema, where the visuals alone can sustain the film and indeed do last longer than the lesser parts of the film, but, ultimately, that quality and its often clever script, are undone by the ending. It does not ruin the film, in terms of making it a bad film, but it does keep it from the elusive goal of greatness, for it plays out as an attempt at innovation when, in reality, it was already decades passé (as well as being inappropriate to end the film). Kiarostami's film views the human from a telescopic and microscopic position, and which is the more revealing is debatable. That such an innovative approach is substantially ruined by the poor ending is a shame, even if as human as the dilemma it traces.
A unique piece of cinema...beautifully filmed, one of Kiarostami's (and Iranian cinema's) best films....
This was my introduction to Iranian cinema, and it's a fine introduction. This film is one of Abbas Kiarostami's best films, and the first film from Iran to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's a hypnotic, fascinating, and intelligent film, which deals with many complex issues. The film concerns itself with a man driving around Tehran looking for somebody either to kill him or rescue him. It's really striking the way Kiarostami films things, as there is much driving, many long takes (which are all beautifully filmed), and sometimes Kiarostami lets his camera linger on one of the characters of the shot while never showing the other character. There is a long conversation at a construction site with the watchman of the site, and during a 2 1/2 minute unbroken take, you only see the main character while listening to the other character. These directorial decisions never feel forced, but very natural and beautiful. The cinematography (and terrain) around Tehran is visually stunning, and the performances are top notch here. The film is also very ambiguous, and never really provides a solid conclusion. This is one of Kiarostami's finest achievements (even though I like The Wind Will Carry Us more than this film), and it's a great introduction to the poetic, deeply artistic Iranian cinema.
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