Rich ‘Cherry’ Reflects On Suicide and Dignity in Iran

Abbas Kiarostami’s soaring parable, “A Taste of Cherry,” thrusts us inside a Range Rover being driven by a middle-aged man (Homayoun Ershadi) in congested central Tehran.

Throngs of day laborers try to attract his attention, but he keeps going. Clearly he’s looking for something or someone as he gradually makes his way to the mountains that give the city its dramatic backdrop.

By the time he addresses a big, ruggedly handsome man who yells, “Clear out or I’ll smash your face in,” you start wondering whether Ershadi’s Mr. Badii, who has the intense, somber demeanor of Jeremy Irons, is, in fact, cruising, a singularly risky activity in such a homophobic culture. What Badii is after is a man to bury him.

He doesn’t want to reveal why he wants to end his life beyond saying that he’s “exhausted.” He has dug a deep hole by a tree alongside a dirt mountain road. In the evening he plans to take a taxi to the hole, jump in and take his full supply of sleeping pills. All the man Badii hopes to hire has to do is to come by at dawn to make sure he’s really dead and then fill up the hole.

That’s it, but not surprisingly, soliciting for death duty is lots tougher than soliciting for sex, although they seem in this film eerily similar in their solitude and longing.

Badii’s search for the individual to do him final honors becomes, with great ease and simplicity, an odyssey in which Kiarostami invites us to consider life’s meaning--or lack of same--and to honor the human dignity of the various men he tries to hire. They are poor men who could use the money, men who face life as it comes uncomplainingly.

Every shot in this most contemplative yet economical of films attests to Kiarostami’s mastery of his medium--his sense of when it’s important for you to be inside the car to see its passengers reacting to one another and when it’s important to see the Ranger Rover snaking its way alongside the mountainside, inviting us to weigh what we hear being said rather than what the individual doing the saying looks like. (Kiarostami, otherwise pretty much a one-man band, has an exceptional resourceful cinematographer, Homayoun Payvar.)

There’s a strong elliptical quality to Kiarostami’s style, which underlines the filmmaker’s ability to maintain focus with considerable emotional force and depth and with great precision.

The long-acclaimed Kiarostami’s gift in seeming simultaneously unpretentious and profound, his easy way with actors and his expressive sense of place won “A Taste of Cherry” a Golden Palm at Cannes, a first for an Iranian film.

(It took Cannes’ top prize to get the film released in Iran, where suicide is an Islamic taboo. But its domestic play-dates came too late to qualify it for this year’s Oscars. Iran did submit the exquisite, folkloric “Gabbeh,” passed over in the best foreign film nominations.)

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Badii gives a young Kurdish soldier (Ali Moradi) a lift, promising to get him to his barracks by 6 p.m. but heading in a different direction, understandably making the well-mannered youth increasingly wary.

Badii’s emphasis on telling the soldier to first think of how, in a mere 10 minutes, he could make as much money as half his annual army salary does suggest a sexual overture in the offing, but the soldier freaks out when he at last learns Badii’s request.

Along the way, there also will be encounters with, among others, two Afghani refugees, one a cement factory security guard and the other a seminarian who has come to visit the guard, and, most important, an older man (Abdolhossein Bagheri), hunting quail for a university taxidermy course. All will offer their differing views of suicide.

Once having contemplated suicide himself, the older man has an empathy and a maturity that the others lack. At the darkest moment of his life he was brought back from the brink by the delicious flavor of mulberries; he hopes a taste of cherries will do the same for Badii.

He has learned over the years to draw strength from the beauty of nature. He is the kind of individual in whom you perceive extraordinary strength and perception in a seemingly ordinary man.

Suspense starts building as to whether Badii will really go ahead with his plan and how it will end. Will there be a surprise twist that pays off in irony? Suffice to say that Kiarostami, among the handful of Iran’s great filmmakers, invites us to do a lot of thinking for ourselves along the way--and afterward.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: It deals comprehensively with the subject of suicide.

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‘A Taste of Cherry’

Homayoun Ershadi: Mr. Badii

Abdolhossein Bagheri: The Taxidermist

Ali Moradi: The Soldier

Hossein Noori: The Seminarian

A Zeitgeist Films release of an Abbas Kiarostami-CIBY 2000 co-production. Writer-director-producer-editor Kiarostami. Cinematographer Homayoun Payvar. In Farsi, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

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