Taste of Cherry

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion Spine #45: Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cher­ry.

Appar­ent­ly, the entire­ty of Iran is a giant grav­el-pile con­struc­tion site. That’s the impres­sion giv­en in this film, and con­sid­er­ing how lit­tle I know of the coun­try due to my own nation’s sanc­tions against it, I’m going to choose to assume that Iran is a beau­ti­ful coun­try and Kiarosta­mi made a styl­is­tic and the­mat­ic choice to film most of this in loca­tions where just about every­thing is dead and dying, and dry earth cas­cades on all sides in crum­bling ruin.

Few the­mat­ic choic­es could fit bet­ter for a plot revolv­ing around a man who wants to com­mit sui­cide and have some­one bury him, or haul him out of his own grave if he fails to do a prop­er job of it. God­frey Cheshire’s Cri­te­ri­on essay accom­pa­ny­ing this film makes a point to dis­cuss this film in terms of life and death, but I inter­pret it in slight­ly more gen­er­al terms. I don’t think this is a sto­ry about man ver­sus him­self; I think it’s a film about man ver­sus nature. Mr. Badii, for some unstat­ed rea­son, feels dis­con­nect­ed with life. He tries, time and again, to get some­one to show him some mod­icum of atten­tion. Every­one he talks to is so busy liv­ing their lives, inno­cent­ly in the case of the young sol­dier; stu­dious­ly, in the case of the sem­i­nar­ist; and ful­ly, in the case of the old man, that none of them can be both­ered with Badi­i’s exis­ten­tial cri­sis.

A man doing what­ev­er he can to get even the small­est part of the world to notice him, even through sui­cide, is a man full of pride and mis­guid­ed. His cri­sis would not occur to some­one ful­ly engaged in liv­ing life, or to some­one who knows their insignif­i­cance in the grand scheme of things. I’d argue that Kiarosta­mi is mak­ing a dis­tinc­tion between liv­ing life with indif­fer­ence to your insignif­i­cance and being unable to accept that fact and being filled with despair instead. This does­n’t sound par­tic­u­lar­ly pos­i­tive, but it is. At least as far as I’m con­cerned, engage­ment with life is much more pos­i­tive than despair at liv­ing in the first place.