THE TASTE OF CHERRY (1997)
"What does 'need' mean? What does 'help' mean?"
3.5 out of ****
Starring Homayon Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari Directed, Written, Produced & Edited by Abbas Kiarostami Cinematography by Homayun Payvar
His name is Mr. Badii; he used to be in the army. And that, really, is all we know about him. Yet he is the heart of Abbas Kiarostami's Palme d'Or co-winner, THE TASTE OF CHERRY; he is in every scene; he drives what little action there is. We do know one other thing about him: he wants to commit suicide. He says he is "exhausted" by his life, and cannot wait for God to end it, so he will end it himself. He will not explain his reasons, saying that others may comprehend him analytically, but could never know what he is feeling.
He has chosen a peculiar way to die. He has dug a hole in the hills overlooking Tehran, and he plans to lie down in it at night, after swallowing all his sleeping pills. He will pay someone to come at dawn to see if he is still alive; if not, they will fill the grave for him. He is offering a lot of money for this service.
The plot--what little there is--consists largely of Mr. Badii's search for the person who will check on him in the morning. We do not learn much about Mr. Badii (does he have a family? a job?), but that's okay, because the movie is also about the ways in which people respond to his strange request. A shy young soldier just doesn't want to get involved; a seminary student will not assist a suicide for religious reasons; an older man, a taxidermist, agrees to help, because he needs the money for his sick child, but he also does his best to change Mr. Badii's mind, expounding a simple philosophy of life: wouldn't Mr. Badii miss watching the sunrise? the taste of mulberries? These secondary characters--and others he encounters along the way--are superbly realized, and their response to Mr. Badii speaks volumes about who they are; it is fascinating to watch them.
This is a calm, reflective, unhurried movie. There are lots of silences and long, unbroken takes. As Mr. Badii drives through the hills in his Range Rover, Kiarostami is content to let the camera linger on the vehicle as it meanders down hot, dusty backroads. He is also content to let it linger on Mr. Badii's face while he drives, framed by the car window, sometimes speaking to one of his passengers, sometimes alone. This relaxed, unforced approach to film-making is refreshing. We see it so rarely in English-language films; they are always so busy, filled with dialogue, quick cuts, moving cameras, afraid to leave us room to think. THE TASTE OF CHERRY gives us time to contemplate the little details, to fully absorb the images it presents. Kiarostami will let the camera remain, static, watching Mr. Badii from behind as he sits smoking a cigarette, looking out at the night lights of Tehran, for a couple of minutes. And it works. The sleepy rhythms of the film (and the mellifluous Iranian voices) are hypnotic; in some respects, it plays like WINGS OF DESIRE without the voice-overs, although THE TASTE OF CHERRY is much more naturalistic and earthbound.
If the movie were a novel, one could imagine it being written by Virginia Woolf; it approaches cinema the way she approached the novel, developing themes and character in unconventional ways, not through narrative and dialogue, but relying instead on mood, on images and moments. It evokes, but it never explains. It is not 'about' anything that can simply be put into words.
But it has its weaknesses: watching it, we know that the ending will be as ambiguous as Mr. Badii himself, but it turns out to be a little too coy, a little too self-aware. And it was also a little too easy, I think, for Kiarostami to make Mr. Badii so utterly enigmatic. By revealing so little about his central figure, Kiarostami comes perilously close to making him merely a symbol. In this movie, which is so concrete, so rich with detail, it is odd that nothing is more vague than that which matters most: the life--and death--of Mr. Badii. Had less time been spent lingering on the landscape, and more spent revealing Mr. Badii, the film could have had more emotional weight.
Homayon Ershadi's flawless performance largely compensates for this deficiency, however, making the character real, down-to-earth, enigmatic but not abstract. Much of the movie's power resides in that performance; Mr. Badii's face, his plight, are haunting, thanks to Ershadi's portrayal. Indeed, after the film, I found myself wondering what I would do in a similar situation, if a man like Mr. Badii approached me with such an offer. I did not know; I had never given it any thought before. And that is the beauty of THE TASTE OF CHERRY: it gives us something intriguing to think about, gives us time to think about it, and does not try to do our thinking for us.
A Review by David Dalgleish (January 28/98)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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