ZONE FILM CHALLENGE: A PALME D’OR WINNER
John: Hello, welcome back to the Zone Film Challenge. This week’s prompt, a Palme d’Or Winner, the highest Festival honor at Cannes. We picked 1997, the year of our births — and examined Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. This is at once very spare, but also very complicated, lush, and saturated film. It’s really interesting.
Alex; Yeah, Kiarostami was one of the Iranian New Wave guys who emerged after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. He always faced hurdles with the Iranian government but the films he made while living in Iran were all extremely well regarded if not domestically than abroad. This was his big film in the 1990s. He made a film several years prior, Close-Up, and the Koker Trilogy which were hits critically in the festival circuit but it was Taste of Cherry that brought him into the mainstream.
It was the co-winner of the Palme d’Or, sharing it with Shohei Imamura’s The Eel which we didn’t cover for this just because I wanted to cover this specific gap in my viewing history. I thought this film was lovely. Kiarostami’s films have a simplicity to them; they’re emotionally complex and there’s always metatextual stuff to talk about but the thematic core of the films are simple. They have an emotional delicateness coded in and I find his films to be life-affirming and fascinating. They’re inspiring in a way that films that try to be outright inspiring — those seem like they’re insisting on it and Kiarostami’s don’t.
John: Naturalistic is a good way to describe the whole approach. It’s deliberately shot which makes you want to take note of what’s being done or attempted with the cinematography. There’s a lot of recurring shots, background noise, and hard rules about the way it’s shot. For instance, the main character, Badii, is only shown on his own which communicates his mental state. We never get the tearjerker story as to why he has decided, beyond all convincing, to commit suicide.
Alex: Right. The film is guarded with its motives and anything that’s happening outside the immediate purview of the film. It’s only allowing you to know what it’s allowing you to know and it takes advantage of that. I really like that.
Alex:
It’s been twenty five years since the 50th Cannes Film Festival. 1997 also happens to be the year I was born. This sort of numerology is generally unimportant but it helps square my thinking. I think these quarter anniversaries and half anniversaries are of significant importance since these are the major ones that most of us will see to live. It’s rare that a person lives to be a century old so we should take note of the quadricentennial, semicentennial, and semi-sesquicentennial anniversaries. These anniversaries beg for something extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime happenings. For Cannes, this was the rare year where two films snagged the coveted Palme D’Or; Shohei Imamura’s The Eel and Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. With hindsight, the humanistic Taste of Cherry seems like a shoo-in but in 1997, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The Iranian government had barred Taste of Cherry from competition until two weeks before the start of the festival and the 1997 field was lousy with heavyweight competition like Happy Together, The Ice Storm, and The Sweet Hereafter.
Yet, Taste of Cherry won. It had to share the prize but it won. And that win catapulted Kiarostami to mainstream recognition, allowing Taste of Cherry and his other films significant Western distribution, cementing Abbas Kiarostami as a name to know for Hollywood Heads. In 2022, Taste of Cherry is a capital I-Important film. In the BFI’s 2012 Sight & Sound Film, it was listed as one of the ten greatest films ever made. On Letterboxd’s aggregated list, it sits at 183 for all time films. Criterion, which has been boosting the film since its home release in 1999, permanently hosts it across both HBOMAX and their proprietary Criterion Channel. Despite Iran’s initial restrictions on the film, it demands to be seen. Such a fate seems appropriate for a film so concerned about perseverance in the face of adversity.
What I most appreciate about Taste of Cherry is that it plays its drama in the most minor key. About a quasi-suicidal man, Badii [Homayoun Ershadi], driving around Tehran picking up passengers who he hopes will bury him in the morning, we are never given more information than is absolutely necessary. There are many mysteries baked within the film but its minimalist approach ensures that these mysteries do not dominate the conversations on screen. There is no intrigue here, just the looming specter of despair. When I learned of Badii’s intentions, the movie transformed. No longer was I curious about what he was doing, rather it became imperative that I see this man off the proverbial cliff.
By the nature of the medium, my involvement with the film had to be passive. I could not simply reach out to the screen and insist that Badii not overdose on sleeping pills, instead I had to hope that the men he picked up would not enable him. Kiarostami is able to engender empathy in the viewer with remarkable swiftness. We do not know why Badii wants to commit suicide and Kiarostami never reveals why. Kiarostami wants you to feel for this man’s despair; not to absorb his pain but to better understand the inherent communal nature of humanity. There is much about modern civilization that dehumanizes and can make it more difficult to relate or interact with strangers but at our core, we care about our fellow man. Taste of Cherry is about this more than it’s about whether Badii goes through with his plan or not.
The film’s divisive final moments do not reveal his ultimate fate, opting instead to pull away from where we last saw him, underneath the tree in the open grave he has chosen to die in, to show the behind-the-scenes filming of Taste of Cherry taking place on the opposite hillside. This is not a clever “it’s all a movie” gotcha moment intended to distance the viewer from the heavy drama of the preceding moments and the implications of the decisions made. Rather, these last few moments show the world operating outside of Badii’s closed off, desolate world. We see the joyous act of communal filmmaking, synchronized military drills, the beautiful hillsides on the outskirts of Tehran and are treated to the lively soundscape of the countryside mixing with the city sounds in the distance. It gives a holistic view of what it means to live life and without undermining the film’s narrative opaqueness, reaffirms the director’s and the audience’s unwavering faith in a life worth living.
John:
It’s not uncommon to hear discussion about marginalization in this day and age. You could argue we’ve built a society where marginalization is a feature, not a bug. Many minority ethnic, racial and religious groups are marginalized. Women fight endlessly against their own marginalization. Gay, lesbian, and transgender people still face de-facto marginalization despite the laws now allowing them to marry or pursue gender-affirming care.
Rarely though do we discuss the marginalization of the individual. The feeling of existing outside of the beautiful, vibrant world one’s peers seem to see. The feeling that something is defective, keeping you from seeing the point of it all. I am familiar with the signs and symptoms of clinical depression. It is a disease which affects people in my own life for whom I have a great degree of affection. But I do not think that is what I am describing here. This feeling is something more elementary. Too primal to be clinical.
Taste of Cherry is ultimately a film about that feeling. The sense of standing apart from all other people while life happens around you. Heartbreaking in how unreachable it all seems. It’s a deeply paradoxical film. A life-affirming picture about suicide. A movie without a proper script put together with Faberge Egg precision. A drama where we never get to know the characters. A bottle thriller that takes place all over a city. An inverse good Samaritan parable. A well-off man seeks oblivion from his social inferiors until at last he finds someone who will give him the peculiar kind of “help” he wants only because it’s in his material interest to do so.
Plenty of rich people commit suicide. A well appointed life can still be empty. It should come as no surprise that you can exist on the emotional periphery without touching the economic periphery. Our subject Badii (he’s no hero and “protagonist” implies a level of action Taste of Cherry does not possess) certainly seems comfortable. He drives a range rover. Wears the kind of quarter zip pullover I will forever associate with the upper-middle class. Appears to own a house, even if it doesn’t appear to be huge (it has like 30 seconds of screen time total and the movie is ending at that point). Not to mention he’s doing all this in Iran. A poor country made poorer by years of isolation imposed from within and without. Oppressed by a regressive theocracy and undercut further by western sanctions.
Badii is clearly unhappy. One does not put as much thought as he clearly has into a suicide plan if their life is going well. Abbas Kiarostami deploys his shot-blocking talents to drive the point home even further. We never see Badii in the same frame as anyone else, if another person should appear their face is never visible, or maybe they’re so far in the background that their features blur. We never need a tearjerking speech about depression or some such GIF-able pablum. The devices of cinema are used to convey the distance he feels between himself and his fellow man. Even when he’s standing right in front of them and making sure they’re clear on the specifics of how he wants to be buried. He can’t leave the margins. He’s marginalized himself by means of his own despair.
We spend a lot of time with Badii but we learn so little about him. A lot of American films have this framework for dealing with the depressed or suicidal that’s kind of like playing Ace Attorney. You just deploy context clues to poke and prod them until they break down and spill their tragic backstory. Badii never does, in fact he pointedly explains to one would-be gravedigger that it would not help him to know and he couldn’t understand. Ironically the man Badii at last convinces to aid him is the one most interested in getting to know him. The Taxidermist, having aborted his own suicide attempt from many years prior, reaches a hand of friendship and understanding out to Badii. It is perhaps predictable that he can’t bring himself to take it. When you’ve resolved to be miserable nothing grates on you more than someone trying to cheer you up. In the end the Taxidermist couldn’t save Badii. But life goes on.
Now, I’m sure some of you are about ready to throw your phones. Badii is in a marginalized group, you’ll tell me. He’s gay. To which I say; show me where exactly in the text that is said or even implied. I will admit bias on my part against not only influential grouch Roger Ebert who popularized this reading but also the concept of fan theories in general. They can be good fun and you’re free to consume and interpret media however you wish. Though frankly I tire of people demanding that I take them super seriously. Especially in this day and age, I thought the author was dead? You guys gotta pick a side. Either the text is the text and anything said after the fact is meaningless or Jar Jar Binks was actually a secret sith lord all along. Can’t have it both ways! Bit of a jarring tangent, I know. But much like Kiarostami I didn’t wanna end this on a down note.
Alex: I think the film’s amazing, I think it’s something else.
John: I’d like to rewatch it when I’m in a different headspace. It’s a nice inversion of what bothered us about The Ninth Configuration, the exploration of there being a good way for taking your own life. Kiarostami’s take is that it doesn’t matter if you have a good reason or not.
Alex: Exactly. His idea of sacrifice is that it’s not something to be done because you’re denying the existence of the world around you and that’s a grave sin.
John: It won’t absolve you, there’s no absolution in it. It’s an end.
