Taste of Cherry (1997)

An Iranian man drives his truck in search of someone who will quietly bury him under a cherry tree after he commits suicide.

Director:

Abbas Kiarostami

Writer:

Abbas Kiarostami

Stars:

Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari

3 wins & 5 nominations.

Cast

Credited cast:
Homayoun Ershadi	...	Mr. Badii
Abdolrahman Bagheri	...	Mr. Bagheri
Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari	...	Soldier
Safar Ali Moradi	...	The soldier
Mir Hossein Noori	...	The seminarian
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Ahmad Ansari

Storyline

Middle-aged Mr.Badii is planning to commit suicide and desperately seeks anyone to assist him - he has already dug out the grave in the mountains, but the assistant will have to bury him when he will do the deed. He asks Kurd soldier, Afghan seminarian, but everyone refuses by some reason. Finally he finds an old Turkish taxidermist, who has a sick son and previously attempted suicide himself, and he agrees to assist Badii.

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Plot Keywords:

suicide | abrupt ending | driving a car | conversation in a car | iran | 

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Genres:

Drama

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Did You Know?

Trivia

The film's coda was to a certain extent unplanned, according to an interview with Kiarostami. After they had filmed preliminary versions of the final scene, they did the final scene proper, but the lab accidentally destroyed these final reels. Kiarostami then decided that the off-focus and colors of the test reels worked, and used those instead.

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Goofs

In the opening scene, as Mr. Badhi is driving past laborers looking for work, the same middle-aged white haired man, wearing a checkered sweater vest, is seen twice.

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Quotes

Mr. Bagheri: When you want to help someone, you have to do it properly, with all your heart. It's better... more just and more reasonable.

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Connections

Spoofed in Lips to Lips (2000)

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Soundtracks

St. James Infirmary
(uncredited)
Often attributed to Irving Mills
Performed by Louis Armstrong

User Reviews

Failed arthouse experiment

This is a little more interesting when you know that most of it was improvised with Kiarostami sitting in the driver's seat talking to the other actors. But like most purely improvised films, there's a rather low ratio of insights to the amount of screen time spent struggling to come up with something interesting. (Actually, only one of the characters really manages to be interesting at all.) Likewise, some of the shots of Mr. Badii driving around aimlessly have a certain Antonioniesque hypnotic effect, but most of them look no more interesting than random video you might have shot yourself in the industrial part of town.

There are critics who call this kind of untouched-by-art realism genius, who say that Kiarostami is making us think, reconsider the very nature of cinema, and so on. To my mind, the message of the film-- the taste of cherry makes life worth living-- is no more or less profound than, say, Woody Allen rattling off a few of the things that make life worth living in Manhattan, or the epiphany the kid in American Beauty gets from a plastic bag. (Likewise the message that it's all only a movie. Never woulda guessed.) And critics who find such a message shallow in a piece of slick entertainment, but deep when it's in a deliberately unentertaining art film, need to reexamine their critical principles, or lighten up a little-- or at least go see again the work of real art Kiarostami alludes to in his title, Wild Strawberries, which has more depth of characterization and emotional richness in any five minutes than this manages to scrounge up in an hour and a half.

Details

Official Sites:

sourehcinema Zeitgeist Film [United States]

Country:

Iran France

Language:

Persian

Release Date:

26 November 1997 (France)

Also Known As:

Taste of Cherry

Filming Locations:

Tehran, Iran

Box Office

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$10,923

Company Credits

Production Co:

Abbas Kiarostami Productions, CiBy 2000, Kanun parvaresh fekri

Technical Specs

Runtime:

95 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1