Blu-ray Review: Abbas Kiarostam’s Taste of Cherry on the Criterion Collection

Criterion gives new life to Kiarostami’s lovely, understated rumination on existential quandaries.

Taste of Cherry“There is but one truly serious philosophical question,” writes Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, “and that is suicide.” Faced with what Camus terms “the unreasonable silence of the world,” and believing that life is inherently meaningless, why should an individual choose to go on? This is the conundrum that confronts Mr. Badii (Homayoun Erhadi), the protagonist of Taste of Cherry, Abbas Kiarostami’s understated and evocative account of a man’s existential despair. Because Mr. Badii never reveals his reasons for contemplating suicide, the audience is left guessing. Backstory in this case would only reduce Mr. Badii to the status of a specific character who finds himself immersed in a particular set of circumstances. Absent that, he can serve more easily as an archetype, a kind of Iranian everyman.

For the first 20 minutes or so, we have no idea what Mr. Badii might be after. From the passenger seat of his Range Rover, we watch him drive from Tehran into the desolate outskirts of the city, which appear to consist of one enormous construction project. The occasional long shot situates the vehicle amid the arid landscape. Along the way, Mr. Badii pauses from time to time to converse with some laborers. His terse inquiries elicit mostly friendly yet noncommittal responses, except for one man who threatens to smash his face in. This aggressive reaction seems to suggest that he thinks Mr. Badii might be cruising for a male lover. But, as it turns out, all he wants is for someone to make sure that he’s gone through with the act of suicide and, if so, to toss “20 spadefuls of earth” over him.

Much of the film is taken up with conversations between Mr. Badii and three potential participants in his suicide pact. Each of their positions—soldier, seminarian, museum employee—represents a pillar of society, yet each of them is an ethnic outsider: a Kurd, an Afghan, and a Turk, respectively. It’s canny how Kiarostami indicates the ways in which a person can be bound up in the social fabric and still stand apart from it, but the disparity between Mr. Badii and his interlocutors is also economic: Though he speaks of friendship and receiving the gift of assistance, his primary persuader remains a large sum of money.

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Where the soldier merely flees in fright, and the seminarian flatly refuses owing to religious prohibitions, the elderly taxidermist, Mr. Bagheri (Abdolrahman Bagheri), hesitantly agrees. And yet he hopes to use the very act of storytelling as a way to persuade Mr. Badii against his rash intention. The tale concerns his own futile attempt to hang himself from a tree branch. The unexpected appearance of mulberries on the tree—a sumptuous goad to the all-too-human senses—distracts him from his stated purpose. Though mute (at least according to Camus), the world has presence; it appeals to the observant eye. So it comes as no surprise that, near the end of the film, there are several long shots of Mr. Badii sitting on a bench or a hilltop, gazing out at the city and all of creation in the distance.

Significantly, Mr. Bagheri soon takes over the navigation of the Range Rover, which, until then, has been seen endlessly meandering in circles around the open grave that awaits Mr. Badii. The older man promises to take him along “a longer road, but better and more beautiful.” It’s hard not to see this as a touching metaphor for life itself. The vehicle soon passes from harsh earthen wasteland to lovely rolling hills spotted with trees in bloom. Curiously, some of the trees are green, some speckled with autumnal hues—a subtle reminder of the ways that life and death interpenetrate each other in cyclical fashion.

The last minutes of the film are its most remarkable. And they’re all about transitions. We see Mr. Badii in his grave. The screen goes black. Then, in clearly degraded camcorder footage, we’re presented with the making of an earlier scene. The actor Erhadi passes Kiarostami a cigarette. We’re behind the scenes, in another realm, with The Taste of Cherry having passed over from film to video, from fiction to the fact of its making, from death to life—or is it afterlife? We’ve also passed from silence to song. A film that hitherto had absolutely no score erupts into Louis Armstrong’s instrumental rendition of “Saint James Infirmary,” a blues number about looking coolly at death while celebrating life. That’s Taste of Cherry for you. To quote the lyrics of Cab Calloway’s rendition of the song: “We raise Hallelujah as we go along.”

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Image/Sound

Criterion’s 4K restoration of Taste of Cherry is a vast improvement over 1999’s DVD edition, which was non-anamorphic and as such not enhanced for widescreen televisions. The image here is sharper, with far greater density and clarity on the textures of clothing and close-ups on faces, which are, after all, so integral to the film. Colors, from dun earth tones to the intense greens and yellows of the foliage, are vibrant and densely saturated. Grain levels are suitably cinematic. The LPCM mono track clearly delivers the dialogue and lends some depth to ambient industrial sounds and half-overheard conversations.

Extras

Criterion’s Blu-ray upgrade of Taste of Cherry includes a handful of welcome supplements, including the 1997 on-camera interview with Abbas Kiarostami that was the sole extra of note on the DVD. In it, the filmmaker discusses accepting the dictates of censorship as a series of challenges, preferring films that lull you to sleep over ones that nail you to your seat, extols the importance of the imagination in both cinema and life, briefly comments (breaking into English for the moment) on Quentin Tarantino as cinephile and filmmaker, and admits extracting his life philosophy from his frequent work with children.

Project is a 40-minute “sketch film” for Taste of Cherry, in which Kiarostami and his son, Bahman, rehearse a number of its scenes, intercut with footage from the finished film. In a new interview, Iranian film scholar Hamid Naficy talks about the influence of Kiarostami’s early work in advertising and documentary filmmaking on his later narrative films. In a brief but cogent episode of “Observations on Film Art” from the Criterion Channel, critic and historian Kristin Thompson highlights the importance of landscape in Kiarostami’s cinema and explicates his quite distinctive technique for generating narrative suspense. The illustrated foldout booklet includes a perceptive reading of the film from critic A.S. Hamrah, which, among other things, intriguingly compares Taste of Cherry to Barbara Loden’s Wanda.

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Overall

A superlative Blu-ray upgrade from the Criterion Collection gives new life to Abbas Kiarostami’s lovely, understated rumination on existential quandaries.

Score: 
 Cast: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Safar Ali Moradi, Mir Hossein Noori  Director: Abbas Kiarostami  Screenwriter: Abbas Kiarostami  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1997  Release Date: July 21, 2020  Buy: Video

Budd Wilkins

Budd Wilkins's writing has appeared in Film Journal International and Video Watchdog. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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