Taste of Cherry (1997)

Film: Taste of Cherry (1997)

Stars: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Safar Ali Moradi, Mir Hossein Noori

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Oscar History: No nominations, but it won the Palme d'Or

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Today we take a look at one of the mid-90's Palme d'Or winners, and one from one of the more-celebrated directors of our time (at least if you ask your local cinephile rather than your local Oscar voter).  Abbas Kiarostami has made breathtaking movies (I love Certified Copy), but his movies come with their own detractors.  We'll get into this below, but Taste of Cherry, which is considered by many to be a landmark of minimalist movies, came armed with a lot of detractors, and was one of the more critically-mixed Palme winners of the decade (it actually shared the title with The Eel, which I've never seen and will surely be part of a future Palme week on the blog).  I found this strange having seen Certified Copy, a movie brimming with complicated ideas, but one that I think few people would consider dull, and so I went into Taste of Cherry with a high level of intrigue.  Let's find out where I land...

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is, as I mentioned above, quite minimalist.  It essentially is the story of Mr. Badii (Ershadi), a middle-aged man who is driving through Tehran looking for a man to do a specific job for him.  As he starts picking up different men, all in desperate need of the high amount of money he's promised to pay them, he confesses that he is going to kill himself, and he needs someone to bury him after he dies.  Continually the men who go in his car, from a young soldier to a theology student to a taxidermist try to talk him out of it, first by refusing to help and then with the taxidermist, telling him a long story about the taste of mulberries (I'm guessing the translation here is why the film is titled Taste of Cherry rather than Taste of Mulberry, but I could be wrong) eventually bringing him back from trying to kill himself many years ago.  The film ends with the taxidermist promising to kill Mr. Badii, but only if Mr. Badii is dead in the grave he's dug for himself, and the film ends with Mr. Badii lying (still alive) in the gravestone as a thunderstorm begins.

Well, that's not exactly where it ends.  My read on the initial ending was that Mr. Badii had listened to the taxidermist's story, and whatever had driven him to suicide was gone now, and so the taxidermist (someone who seemed to genuinely care about him) will find this man alive in the morning (you could also take the con here & assume he's taken his sleeping pills and has finally found the peace he's spent the movie looking for-it's a very open ending).  But the ending of the film is weirdly a long dark screen followed by a shot of Kiarostami filming the final scene, implying a strange break with the fourth wall of the movie.

The first ending is relatively conventional, but it works; having the main character who has spent the whole film trying to end his life have a question of whether he still has something to live for is a good ending-it works.  But the breaking of the fourth wall, for me, takes me out of the film entirely, and makes me wonder what the point was.  I didn't want to make sure I misread this sequence, so I read some theories on this before I wrote this review, and I don't buy it; the comments about a movie being a mini-death are provocative, but I feel like he put a giant asterisk on everything we've seen before us with this random "twist," and I left not sold.  I didn't entirely buy some of the issues that Roger Ebert (the most famous film critic in the world when this film came out, and its most vocal detractor) had with the film-I didn't so much find it boring as meandering, though I agree with Ebert's comments that the film would have been deepened had we learned something more about Mr. Badii and why he's trying to kill himself (and I also agree with Ebert that there is a clear queer element to this movie in the way that Mr. Badii picks up these men, seemingly implying something sexual in the delivery of his pickup).  But the ending kind of ruined what was otherwise a contemplative film that I enjoyed, but didn't love.  As a result, I'm going with 2/5 stars not because there wasn't potential, but because I can't shake an ending I felt jolted most of the rest of the movie.