Lone Riders

An exquisitely edited film about solitude.

Taste of Cherry

Written, directed and edited by Abbas Kiarostami

A Zeitgeist Films release

Opening Friday, June 12, at the Roxy Theater

Recommended

by Sam Adams

Nothing is harder than making art seem effortless. The filmmaking in Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, is so flawless, so perfectly in tune with the director's intentions, that it would be easy to underestimate the level of the film's achievement. Shot in long takes, with the camera often at a considerable distance from the actors, Taste of Cherry is a work driven by rhythm, by the delicate pulse of cuts and the slow, insistent zigzag of the camera as it follows a car up a mountain road.

Taste of Cherry's overt subject is suicide, a topic sufficiently taboo in Kiarostami's native Iran that the film only barely escaped state censorship in time to make it to Cannes. But in more general terms, Kiarostami's subject is solitude, and the importance of human connections. Our introduction to Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) comes as he drives the streets of a town, looking at men on the street through the windows of his car. Badii's weary eyes and his desperate, hungry look convey the sense of a man searching for something he isn't sure he wants to find, and as he watches the people on the street, he seems like a voyeur, peering at a life he has forgotten how to lead.

All we know at first is that Badii is driving, stopping occasionally to offer men money for some unnamed task. His first choice not surprisingly takes Badii's offer for a pickup, and threatens to smash his face in. Eventually, a young soldier (Ali Moradi) accepts Badii's offer of a ride to his barracks. The soldier, it turns out, is as starved for human contact as Badii, and the two make stilted conversation. But when Badii reveals the job he wants the soldier to do, the boy bolts, and Badii is alone again.

It is only when Badii makes his proposition to the soldier, some 20 minutes into the movie, that we finally learn his objective. Badii plans to kill himself that evening at sunset, and he wants someone to bury him. He has already dug himself a grave atop a mountain overlooking the city, and he plans to take sleeping pills, lie in the hole and wait for his as-yet-unchosen accomplice to come the next morning, verify that he is dead and cover his body with earth.

"When you come to bury me," he tells the old man, "make sure you shake my shoulders good and hard. I might still be alive!"

We never learn why Badii plans to end his own life, because the question in Taste of Cherry is not Why kill yourself? but Why live? Badii's next passenger, a religious scholar, offers only a handful of platitudes to deter Badii from his grim task. But Badii's third and final passenger, a simple old taxidermist (Abdolhossein Bagheri), begins to turn the tide. Upset but not shocked by Badii's request, the old man tries to remind him of the pleasures of life: "Can you really give up the taste of cherries?"

To the film's credit, it is not the substance of the old man's monologue that is important, but the fact of its existence. Even the most devout sentimentalist might cringe as the old man relates how he nearly hung himself from a mulberry tree, but came home with a basket of berries instead. What's important is that the old man has tried to dissuade Badii, motivated not by fear or dogma, but by empathy. Perhaps it's not enough to turn Badii around—we never find out exactly what happens—but his resolution does begin to crack. "When you come to bury me," he tells the old man, "make sure you shake my shoulders good and hard. I might still be alive!"

According to Kiarostami, most of the actors in Taste of Cherry never met each other; each half of the conversations inside the car was filmed separately, with the director taking the place of the other character. Every one of the film's particulars contributes to that sense of aloneness; rarely are two characters seen in the same shot, and much of the film's dialogue is delivered offscreen, with the camera focused on the listener. For minutes at a time, the camera even retreats from the characters altogether; we hear voices talking, but see only Badii's white Range Rover snaking its way up the mountain. It's hard to describe the film's style without making it sound heavy-handed or off-putting, and indeed many films about alienation do have the effect of being alienating themselves. (Antonioni's Red Desert, to which Taste of Cherry has been compared, is a good example of a movie that ratifies alienation by presenting characters so unlikable and inhuman that no one would want to connect with them.) But Kiarostami draws perfectly tuned, organic performances from his cast of non-actors, and the seductive rhythm of his flawless editing is the film's silent heartbeat.