Taste of Cherry (Widescreen)

We bound along dirt roads in his car with Bari, the central character, on a strange mission through the white dust of the bleached outskirts of Tehran and the red dust of the barren countryside. No juiciness, greenness, or comfort in the prospects for this ride. Why should there be? Bari has none.

Bari, looking for someone to help him complete the last stage of a mission, is picking up strangers and making an unusual proposal to them. When they hear it, the rising, naive fear of a young soldier, the creature simplicity of a plastic bag collector, and the compassionate inexperience of a seminary student are reflected in the faces of these men. Bari is asking to have some earth shoveled over him after his suicide. The soldier runs away in plain horror; the plastic-bag man, who seems rendered imbecile by poverty, sticks to collecting inventory for sale to support his family; and the seminary student escapes through his theology.

What can you do when you're watching the film and are thus stuck in the car with this man Bari? Stop watching? Grieve that he's past being moved by the human graces we encounter on the road-the beliefs and commitments, the lending hands, the cups of tea offered out of courtesy or fellow-loneliness? Not that we'd be sane viewers to expect him to be changed by any of this, or even for him to drink the tea. Like the barren views out the car windows, Bari is pared way down. (And any viewer reaction to Bari's state of being is individual and optional because Kiarostami never programs feeling-responses.)

Then comes the old taxidermist's lined and weary, pragmatic, maybe even authentically kind old face, and the plot, as they say, thickens. Will the taxidermist's tale of his own attempted suicide help to change Bari's mind? Or will Bari act on the taxidermist's agreement to bury him? Why does Bari later pursue him through the beautiful gates to his workplace? Or how much does money have to do with anything?

But Kiarostami lives to subvert whatever plot he allows to build. And while the visual has carried us deep and far, it has also led deep and far into labyrinths of radical philosophical questions regarding suicide-one's own or another's. Kiarostami's movies leave you knowing a lot, but you have to revise your definitions of knowing to know you know it. Children are really too smart to be spooned out truths, and I
like to think that we are as grownups as well. Here's a director who throws us back on our natural, childlike (not childish) instinctual resources when it comes to understanding and especially to enjoying deeply. Forgive the triteness, but such is the place within us where art is made, and whatever can be more satisfying than that?

I think that Taste of Cherry is both less complex in its conception and less ecstatically inspired than the later The Wind Will Carry us, which is one of my favorite films ever. But so far, I've loved the pull to parts of my being that Kiarostami films make and other directors' films touch little or not at all.

This film explores the ethics of suicide from an Islamic standpoint. It surpirsed me initialy that Iranian films were allowed to be shown in the US given the current sanctions with their government. Interestingly, the Iranian government's censorship of films is more relaxed than I expected. (Though the opening koranic verse is shown on the screen before the film starts)

The Farsi/Persian name of the film is Ta'm e guilass. The film itsel is directed by Abbas Kiarostami. The story deals with a man who intends to commit suicide by taking sleeping pills, who drives around looking for someone to go to a spot the next day to see if he is still alive and bury him if he is dead or take him home if he survives. The people he asks to help him try to talk him out of doing himself in.

The DVD has a theatrical trailer, filmography of the director and an interview with the director for special features.