A Taste of Cherry

Just saw A Taste of Cherry, 1997, by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, which won a Palme D'Or at Cannes. Although the start was not exactly prepossessing, I found the movie more and more interesting as it went on, and it has been resonating strongly with me ever since. 


We all need others in our lives. The standard narrative for this need is the love story. A man or a woman searches for someone to share life with, to love and to cherish, and be loved and cherished by, until death. In some respects A Taste of Cherry is the negative to this positive, a sad undermining of it, in an unfortunate land; in any case, a parallel. Like a love story, it ends as soon as the right person has been found. 


The protagonist is Mr Badii, a middle-aged man searching for someone to shovel earth over him after he commits suicide and lays down in the grave he has already dug beneath a cherry tree on the outskirts of Tehran. In a subtle nod to the more traditional stories we are used to, the first man he approaches thinks he is looking for a gay pickup. But no, he is not looking for sex, or companionship, much less love. His need is absolutely minimal: all he wants from the other is a decent burial, the tiniest shred of humanity. Because a personal relationship like love is not involved, he shows no emotion, no involvement: throughout the movie, he remains expressionless. 


Badii goes about his quest by inviting men who look promising into his 4x4 and driving them around interminable winding dirt roads up and down a hill outside Tehran to the grave he has dug, so they can understand what he wants from them. The constant twists and turns, on which the visuals linger, are of course suggestive of the tortuous nature of any such quest. The setting itself is richly ironic, a dusty area where earth is constantly being moved: groups of men dig holes, presumably for trees, heavy equipment roars around, moving huge quantities of dirt from one place to another. And yet it is hard to get someone to move twenty shovelfuls into a grave. 


As in a parable, Badii meets a series of interesting characters who have different reasons to refuse his request: the construction worker who thinks he is gay, a Kurdish soldier doing his military service who is too shy and simple to accept such an unusual task; an Afghan seminarist whose religion tells him suicide is wrong. Finally, he finds an old Turkish taxidermist, himself tempted by suicide in earlier days, who tries to dissuade Badii by relating his own experience, and how he realized how beautiful life is. However, Badii is adamant, and the taxidermist agrees to bury him. 


The whole movie until now has taken place in the fall and winter, the colours of the landscape invariably a dusty yellow-brown, not without charm in the bright sun, but cool and lifeless. On the night Badii takes his sleeping pills and lies down in the grave, a storm breaks out and the rain pours down. And suddenly now, everything changes, and instead of the story continuing, we witness part of the shooting of a movie: here is the actor who plays Badii, the director giving orders, a bunch of recruits who we'd seen previously marching up the winding road. 


But this is not the movie we have just seen. Here the landscape is exuberantly green, and the soldiers, seen before on a forced march, now stop to rest by the cherry tree. Their joyful boisterousness recalls Badii's happy memories of military life, and nature here is as the Turk saw it, brilliantly beautiful. This is not Badii's empty, lonely world, but a busy, happy, companiable one, one that was before, and can be after. Life goes on, greater and better than the one sad episode we have just seen. Badii's fictitious body, and the rain, and the telling, have provided the stuff to trumpet the possibility of a brighter world.