Movie of the Week: TASTE OF CHERRY (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

He lives! (Talking about myself, not Mr. Badii)

If you had asked me, when I first started this newsletter, about which director had the highest odds of being the first repeat offender on Movie of the Week, I probably would have felt uncertain giving you any answer that wasn’t Abbas Kiarostami. Sure, it reasonably could have been another perennial favorite like Mike Leigh, Yasujirō Ozu, or Edward Yang, but in the end it was always going to be the artist who evolved my very sense of what cinema is and can be. This comes during a time that has been all about personal evolution: I recently moved out of the San Fernando Valley after seven years there with my best friends, and moved in with my partner and her dog on the western edge of Los Feliz; I’m approaching the end of a five-year TV development process whose outcome could determine what the next few years of my life — or maybe even the rest of my life — looks like; and as such, I am, not for the first time and certainly not the last, seriously wondering if I need a new career path. All that briefly faded away, however, when I walked to the Los Feliz 3 last Friday to catch a rare 35mm print of Kiarostami’s 1997 Palme d’Or winner. I encountered Taste of Cherry first in college, after I’d already had my neurons rearranged by Close-Up (1990) and Certified Copy (2011), and I remember being … not fully taken by it. The premise is threadbare, even for Kiarostami: Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), a middle-aged bourgeois suffused with melancholy, circles the outskirts of Tehran in his Range Rover. Badii is looking for a working-class man to do what he describes as a “lucrative job,” but the nature of the job keeps turning Badii’s possible suitors away. Before we learn what’s really going on, we wonder if maybe Badii is a repressed gay man cruising for a partner, or if he’s hiring a contract killer; when we’re told that he’s searching for someone to bury him the following morning after he takes his own life, Kiarostami shows his hand ever so slightly in a film that’s mostly about what we don’t see and hear. What struck me this time around was how much it’s a film about class, and how that informs every contour of its beautifully minimalist shape. The men Badii picks up are afraid of the job not only for moral reasons, as 20-year-old me thought, but for social and economic ones too. At the end of the day, though, you don’t need to “explain” or “understand” Taste of Cherry as so many have attempted for nearly twenty years now. All you really need to do is watch Badii’s SUV haul itself repeatedly up those mesmerizing Iranian hills while you think about life, death, and quiet enormity of all that bridges the two. Let it all fade back in, slowly and with feeling.

Streaming on the Criterion Channel, Kanopy, and HBO Max.