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Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Starring Homayon Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri
Iran, 1997
Not Rated (nothing offensive)
CIRCLES
Abbas Kiarostami has reached a pinnacle of international success
with Taste of Cherry, one of the most acclaimed films to come out
of his native Iran. Though his earlier Through the Olive Trees was
slated for a Miramax release, the company dropped the film,
leaving Kiarostami in the dust. Only now is he becoming more
recognized and known outside his country, and Taste of Cherry is
a wonderful study of everyday slowness and the struggle between life,
death, pain, and man, with subtle undertones of Iranian values,
though the film’s methods and plot are questionable.
In this ambiguous film, a man wanders the Iranian city for someone who will bury him after he commits suicide. The bulk of the movie takes place in his car and on the dusty, brown roads that serve as the dull, yet beautiful scenery of the film. He meets quite a number of people- all of whom refuse to carry out his request. He offers them money, but these men, even though they are poor, hold fast to their religious Islamic beliefs and will have no part in this man’s self-destruction. This man exhibits no depth of feeling; he is devoid of expressible sorrow, or fears an emotional breakdown will stimulate a renewed longing to live. Kiarostami only hints at what could be, but he never shows us what is. I think his decisions at making Taste of Cherry blurry plot-wise allude to the fact that there is nothing simple or definite in life, but, alas, I am imagining this. The beauty of this film and many films like it is that it involves the audience in the filmmaking and storytelling process. Viewers are aloud to make their own decisions and take away from the bare bones of the movie what they want to and can.
Taste of Cherry is not only vague, it is tedious. It crawls turtle-slow on a path as dusty as the streets of the town depicted. Kiarostami, who serves as the producer, writer, director, and editor (an Iranian John Sayles?) of this movie, has stated in an interview that he despises films that "provoke" emotions or startle their audiences. You are engrossed in the story of the film, he says, but feel cheated afterwards. This strange approach to film (he seems to shun entertainment, or at least the majority of film entertainment) may explain why Taste of Cherry is nothing impressive or engrossing at first glance. I believe that the medium of film is for, primarily, entertainment, intelligent entertainment. I do not agree with Kiarostami that movies without obvious emotions are necessarily better than ones with outward pathos. All movies are manipulative- art incorporates the artist’s stimulation of an audience’s thoughts and senses, whether it be subtle or not. Films that are open-ended or do not patronize one side against another are manipulative in their way too: they provoke the viewer to think, and to be open-minded themselves. What Kiarostami is probably referring to is overt, studio-type provocation, which critics obviously do not welcome. But while trying not be stimulating, Kiarostami’s film becomes unintelligible. I can appreciate his idea more than I can appreciate the outcome itself. Taste of Cherry is an intelligent, boring film, to be blunt- and that is why it is not a masterpiece. Taste of Cherry provokes no emotions and stimulates no immediate reaction. It aims for no particular response or feeling. It is as free as a cryptic song, and therein lies what is interesting and meritorious about the movie. We’re interested in finding out what happens to this man, but we don’t get the answer. Taste of Cherry takes a completely objective stand-point and is very removed from its characters, and in that way, it mirrors the distance people put between themselves and others, and the film’s impression is not so much made by Kiarostami, but by the audience.
The troubled man meets an elderly taxidermist in the final hours of his afternoon and we hear this old man’s story of his own attempted suicide that resulted in his redemption by a mulberry tree. He fondly remembers his being saved from his deathly state by the little things in life- the delicious taste of mulberries, kids on their way to school, laughter, the sunset. The suicidal man is probably moved. After he gets the taxidermist to agree to come for him the next morning to bury him if he is dead, he asks the old man to make sure he is not alive before burying him. He watches the sunset and waits in a hole in the ground as a storm brews above him at night.
We never discover what triggered this man’s violent emotions of taking his own life and we never find out what happens after that night storm. Does he live or die? This may be irrelevant, but, then, what is relevant in this movie? Are we just supposed to observe?
There is an interesting but seemingly useless shot-on-video coda that ends this film, showing footage of Kiarostami shooting Taste of Cherry. There seems to be no purpose for this scene, but perhaps it has the same intention as Bergman had for his broken projector intro and outro in Persona: as a way of re-connecting us with life. If so, the scene doesn’t carry out its aim well. Perhaps it was meant to add color to an otherwise bland-brown film. Perhaps it’s an Iranian thing.
Taste of Cherry is, for the most part, a quiet film. Dialogue peppers many scenes, but it is quiet talk, and seems to go round and round in circles. If you want to be creative, you could say the movie is about circles- the suicidal man’s car keeps going round and round and round on the dusty mountain paths of the city, and the conversation and the man’s continually unsuccessful requests go in the same sense of redundancy. The sound of gravel crunching beneath tire wheels permeates the film’s atmosphere, which is especially fitting when you relate it to the elderly taxidermist’s speech on life’s small pleasures. By using no music or score, Kiarostami highlights these small nuances, and by eliminating an emotional stimulator like music, Kiarostami is making the film both more boring and more objective. Small pleasures and details are what I believe this film is about, and while this is a very mainstream conclusion, Taste of Cherry is so unspecific and detached that several ideas and meanings can be extracted from its fabric. There is nothing conclusive about Taste of Cherry: it skims the surface of man’s relationship with God, death, other people, and himself. The movie is not about a man’s descent, or this man’s struggle, or what this man thinks. I guess it’s about what the audience thinks.
Critics have debated whether Taste of Cherry discusses anything at all. The theme of "life's beauty" is as old as Chaplin and those even before him. Filmmakers have been pouncing on this message for years. The fact that this message is basically what Taste of Cherry amounts to and the fact that it is an excruciatingly boring ride to get to this much-used issue makes Taste of Cherry's credibility questionable. Granted, the "life is beautiful, great, worth living, etc." theme is very important and true, but if we want to be reminded about this, all we have to do is go to Mr. Capra.
Taste of Cherry is technically captivating, if visually dull. The cinematography, especially in the last portion of the film, is arresting in its own tiresome way. The last scene before the infamous coda closure in which the suicidal man waits in a hole in the ground as night and rain fall from above him and waits to see if death will claim him still haunts me. I think Taste of Cherry is a good film but it plays around more with technique and style than with character and story. It is a film that is without most of the things film can offer nowadays (visual effects, insistent score, melodrama), but, by offering none of the normal film elements, Taste of Cherry offers something different: an experience of pacing, life tedium, and roundabouts.
By Andrew Chan
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