Ta'm E Guilass

(The Taste of Cherry)

A film by Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, 1997),

with Homayoun Ershadi, Ahdolhossein Bagheri, Afsin Khorshibakhtari.

Winner of the Golden Palm at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.

Mr Badii is desperate. Suicide eventually looks like the only way out. Mr Badii has thoroughly anticipated every detail, but one: he needs someone to give his body a peaceful eternal rest, i.e. a decent burial. As a result, he anxiously drives around in the outskirts of Teheran in search for the volunteer that would be "professional" enough to provide him with a simple service he's definitely willing to pay for: it's not that hard to throw a couple of shovelfuls of sand in a hole after all...

In The Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami's originality rests upon his paradoxical approach of death as a pretext to celebrate life. The movie calls for aesthetic reminiscences of a world of beauty when in despair. As British poet Keats would say: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever". The cherry is thus a metaphor of living beauty. Kiarostami's message is clear all along the movie. Too clear sometimes. In spite of an extremely sober visual style -few camera movements, greyish photography, slow pace, minimum dialogs-, the hero's encounter with his "conscience" sounds too didactic. But Kiarostami's motives are politically praiseworthy; so let's forgive, along with the 1997 Cannes Jury, that bit of moralism and, with that, the slight unrealism of the hero's character too -who hasn't grinned at Mr Badii's naive search for the right man at all wrong places?.

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