The premise
Taste of Cherry is a film about a man driving through the outskirts of Tehran in search of someone to bury him after he kills himself. It does not explain why he wants to die, nor does it dramatise his past or inner life. Abbas Kiarostami sets out to hold stillness, silence, and moral ambiguity as primary materials — not as stylistic choices but as necessary conditions for asking whether life, stripped of narrative cause and emotional exposition, retains its weight. The film refuses psychological scaffolding: no flashbacks, no voiceover, no score beyond two diegetic songs. Its ambition is structural and philosophical: to place the viewer alongside Badii not as a character to be understood, but as a presence to be witnessed — and, by extension, to test whether meaning can emerge from restraint rather than accumulation. It treats suicide not as crisis to be resolved but as premise to be inhabited, and asks whether attention itself — sustained, unadorned, patient — might constitute an ethical act. (158 words)
The look of it
The story unfolds almost entirely inside a car moving along dusty, sun-bleached roads. Homayoun Ershadi plays Badii with minimal inflection, his face often half-lit, his tone flat and procedural. The three conversations — with a soldier, a seminarian, and a taxidermist — follow the same loose rhythm: offer, refusal or hesitation, quiet persistence. Homayoun Payvar’s cinematography keeps the frame spare and shallow, favouring medium shots that hold space without emphasis, letting dust motes hang in sunlight and tyre tracks recede into heat haze. Abbas Kiarostami edits with long takes and deliberate pauses; cuts arrive only when a conversation ends or a decision is made. There are no close-ups of tears, no swelling music at moments of revelation. The taxidermist’s monologue about mulberries is delivered without flourish, as if rehearsing a memory to himself. Even the storm sequence — the only overtly dramatic passage — is rendered as near-silence punctuated by distant thunder, then swallowed by black. The craft is not invisible; it is calibrated to resist interpretation, forcing attention onto what remains when ornament is removed. (159 words)
The turning point
What lands is the cumulative pressure of duration and repetition: the way each drive feels both identical and subtly distinct, how the landscape shifts from barren slopes to wooded hills, how the light changes from midday glare to dusk’s softening gold. The taxidermist’s speech works because it is grounded in physical sensation — taste, touch, sight — not abstraction, and because it arrives after two rejections that make his willingness feel earned, not sentimental. The film’s refusal to name Badii’s despair makes his solitude legible in other ways: in the way he checks his watch, adjusts the rear-view mirror, or stares at the horizon without blinking. The final shift to video — handheld, grainy, daylight — lands not as rupture but as release: the crew laughing, Kiarostami adjusting a lens, the sound of wind and birds returning. That moment does not resolve Badii’s fate but reorients the film’s gravity from death to the shared, messy act of making. It lands because it does not answer the question it poses; instead, it expands the frame of what counts as response. (157 words)
What stays
What does not land is the assumption that minimalism alone guarantees depth. Some viewers will find the pacing inert, the repetitions mechanical rather than meditative — especially in the first forty minutes, where dialogue stays functional and the car’s motion becomes hypnotic in a way that dulls rather than deepens attention. The soldier’s abrupt exit and the seminarian’s doctrinal refusal risk feeling schematic, their functions too cleanly assigned to plot logic rather than human contradiction. The film offers no counterpoint to Badii’s stillness: no contrasting energy, no visual or tonal variation beyond the weather. When the storm arrives, it arrives late and without build-up, making its emotional weight feel imposed rather than earned. And while the final video coda is formally generous, it risks undercutting the gravity of what precedes it — not by negating Badii’s choice, but by shifting focus so decisively to the process of filming that the man in the grave momentarily recedes into metaphor. Those who need narrative propulsion or psychological anchoring will find the film withholding to the point of evasion. (156 words)
The subject
The themes that matter are mortality as condition rather than event, the ethics of witnessing, and the porous boundary between responsibility and complicity. The film treats suicide not as failure but as choice — one that demands negotiation, not intervention. Each passenger represents a different relationship to obligation: duty, faith, necessity. The taxidermist’s story of tasting mulberries after surviving suicide is not redemption but recalibration — a sensory re-entry into the world, not a moral correction. The film also interrogates the role of the observer: Badii watches others, the camera watches Badii, the audience watches the camera watching. This layered observation never collapses into irony; it sustains a quiet tension between detachment and care. The recurring motif of earth — dug, trodden, thrown — anchors abstraction in materiality. And the absence of non-diegetic music insists that meaning reside not in emotional cues but in duration, texture, silence. These are not themes declared but enacted: the film’s form is its argument. (154 words)
The break
This film is for viewers who trust slowness as a mode of attention, who find resonance in restraint, and who accept that ambiguity may be more honest than resolution. It suits those familiar with Iranian New Wave conventions or with filmmakers like Béla Tarr or Chantal Akerman, where duration is structural, not decorative. It is not for those who require psychological exposition, narrative escalation, or emotional signposting — viewers who expect motivation to be named, stakes to be raised, or closure to be offered. Roger Ebert’s objection — that the film feels like an affectation — names a real divide: those who see its austerity as necessary discipline versus those who see it as self-conscious avoidance. Nothing would change this verdict except a fundamental shift in the viewer’s contract with cinema: if you believe a film must explain before it can move, Taste of Cherry will remain inaccessible. Its value lies precisely in refusing that bargain. (152 words)
The invitation
Yes, it is worth your evening — but only if you approach it as you would a long walk, not a destination. It asks for ninety-five minutes of unbroken attention, not as endurance but as participation: your patience becomes part of its architecture. Those who watch it expecting incident or catharsis will leave dissatisfied; those who allow its rhythms to settle will find themselves altered by its quiet insistence on presence. It is not a film to be consumed but inhabited — a rare work whose power grows with resistance to it. Its Palme d’Or was not awarded for accessibility but for rigour: it holds its ground without concession. To call it ‘difficult’ mistakes its method for its aim. It is difficult only if you insist on reading it as a puzzle to solve rather than a space to occupy. That distinction defines who gains from it — and who does not. Its worth is inseparable from the time it takes. (150 words)