Most of my life I have loved movies, but I have mostly prioritized genre flicks, often with a particular focus on the cheesiest, stupidest movies I could find—even going so far as to celebrate “Stupid Movie Night” as a youth, and regularly gathering with friends with horrendous movies such as the South African ET rip off Nukie (1987) or the “Christian” anti-drug horror film Blood Freak (1972) to laugh and gasp at and wish for my money back. Recently I decided to explore the opposite end of the quality spectrum and began investigating lists of the greatest films ever made. Enter Taste of Cherry, a 1997 Iranian film by celebrated director Abbas Kiarostami. As I’ve been watching films like Taste of Cherry or the Russian Mirror (1975) or Italy’s 8 ½ (1963), I noticed how much these movies demand to be evaluated on a different set of criteria than my usual taste for excitement, or camp, or clever stories. In the case of Taste of Cherry, a movie which apparently had no script, which largely did not use professional actors, and which can come across as confusing and mysterious, I found myself bewildered as to how to evaluate the experience.
The plot is simple and tragic—a middle-aged man named Badii is driving around Tehran looking for someone to help him commit suicide. The details of why he is pursuing this end are never explained and barely hinted at. Most of the action of the film features him meeting a new person, explaining his situation and his request, and the resulting (often awkward) conversation. Some of these conversations are depicted on screen with his vehicle seen driving around dusty roads while we hear the spoken words as mere audio played across the desolate imagery, but we don’t see the actors and their reactions. If there is narrative tension, it mostly comes from the idea of the premise and whether Badii will go through with his plan to its fatal end.
As mentioned in the opening paragraph, according to multiple sources I found, the movie had no script, and instead the director rode about with the actors and prompted them to speak in character. This decision profoundly effects the tone of the film, with the actors (many of whom apparently were not actors at all) deliver their lines in a stilted, unemotional manner that nevertheless sometimes hits home on an emotional level. After all, the entire story is about Badii asking a series of individuals to help him kill himself. The characters don’t really have deep relationships with each other, and the situation is surreal in the first place. The fact that their reactions to one another can feel a bit robotic seems appropriate to the surreality of the situation—compounded by the almost complete lack of music, and the ambiguity of character motivations and back story.
Knowing that the film had no real script, too, puts a different pressure on the dialogue performed. Perhaps my greatest pleasure after viewing the movie was debating the meaning of the film and the motivations of the characters with my former coworker who volunteered to view the film with me, and so we teased out the film’s artistic choices, and talked about the confusing conclusion. But if the movie was not closely planned, if the script was not even written out, then the meanings we tried to pick apart feel like happy coincidences, like a found poem. It can feel like a cheat, like as an audience member we are being invited to search for and construct meaning out of phantoms that had little craft. After all, Roger Ebert counted Taste of Cherry as one of his “hated films,” and his excoriation can still be read online on a website devoted to chronicling his most vitriolic movie reviews.
Yet… the movie remains one of the most celebrated films ever made. Does it not deserve its reputation? So much of film criticism can feel like an artificial pursuit built more on popularity polling and celebration-for-celebration’s sake, a construction of cinema canon clicked together from hazy critical parameters that slightly tweaked or re-focused could easily produce a completely different list of champion films. As different people will have different aesthetic focuses or may gravitate to film based on emotional or circumstantial meanings, and there are no universal “film quality” rules, nor have all the critics viewed the entire range of movies made in the world, the distinction of moving picture greatness seems even thinner, even harder to grasp or evaluate. For example, director Kiarostami claimed in an interview (viewable on the Criterion Channel streaming service) that he didn’t like movies that told a story or that aimed for emotions and that he prefers “films that put their audience to sleep in the theater”—a maverick delineation of quality if I ever saw one! I would further say that, once a film has been recognized as “one of the greats,” too, they become difficult to criticize—as if the movie is now immune to jeering because of the armor of reputation and the any critic could open themselves to the counter accusation that they lack artistic sensitivities. I mean, heck, that’s half the reason I am even writing this review or watching interviews trying to figure out why this movie is so beloved!
Still, perhaps because I was searching so hard to find something to enjoy in the movie, I did find it. Perhaps because I wanted so badly to discover artistic merit and purpose and depth, I inserted my own. I think there is value in that, too. Maybe there is more value in searching for the positive qualities in film and art regardless of its pedigree, regardless of whether the film snobs recognize this or that work as a superior piece fit for display in the equivalent of a motion picture museum.
The taste of cherry in the title is a reference to where Badii wants to die (under a cherry tree), and further to a line from one of the characters Badii tries to talk into helping him kill himself. The man in question tries to talk Badii out of his morbid task, and gives various reasons to find meaning in life—including the succulent taste of a cherry. Because of that one line, and because of the proposed death location, the oncoming ominous conclusion sizzles with a sense of a confluence of meaning The cherry taste seems to pull for life and for death simultaneously depending on the perspective of the viewer, since Badii wants to die under that tree, and his acquaintance wants him to live to enjoy a delicious cherry one more time—all against the backdrop of Tehran and the wandering cast of immigrants and secondary drifters Badii encounters, and their common, limping life concerns.
Does that sense of meaning make Taste of Cherry a standout for artistic merit above, say, a great sci-fi film with clever effects, a comedy with crafted gags that transcend culture and time and place to elicit giggles from all ages, or a tightly plotted and expertly edited action-suspense thriller that supercharges the heart to run? I don’t think it does, as each of those kinds of films serves different functions, and require different kinds of valuable artistry that can be evaluated in different ways. But I still appreciate Taste of Cherry for expanding my palate and helping me to find a new taste to enjoy my life today. And that’s enough for me to recommend it!