The Taste Of Cherry

Abbas Kiarostami is a favourite of cinéastes, although it will speak to few people not looking at it from a film-historical viewpoint. Indeed high-brow film scholar and critic Jonathan Rosenblum called the film a masterpiece based on just such an argument, placing Kiarostami in direct descent from the likes of Godard, Bresson, Rivette, Tati and Antonioni, directors who notably broke with conventional expectations of cinema audiences. Given the l'art pour l'art progression implied here, it is little surprise that the film won the Palme d'Or and that Kiarostami is well-liked in France.

The Taste Of Cherry concerns glum chap (Homayoun Ershadi) who drives interminably around some dusty countryside outside Tehran in a Range Rover looking for someone to bury him after carries out his intention to commit suicide. Eventually someone seems to literally appear from nowhere, agrees to do the job and the film ends. There is a coda with a "making of" sequence to the strains of Louis Armstrong's "St. James Infirmary", the purpose of which is opaque.

There may be, it goes without saying, cultural differences that will make this film less significant to a Western viewer than a domestic one, a condition which leaves the former entirely limited by the meta-level discourse (such as the aforementioned tradition) they can bring to bear on what is being seen . Which is fine if you're attending film school or a committed film theorist but offering little to non-subscribers

If anything carries this film in itself it's the dogged impassivity and existential indifference (to the taste of cherries) of the central character who thus stands in diametric opposition to the more "normal" world views of the various ordinary people he encounters. For most, however, who come to this expecting to engage with any of the usual elements of narrative cinema which takes the everyday and transforms it into something more interesting and stylish they will be more than a little befuddled at the affirmation of Kiarostami's refusal to do so.

 

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