In Abbas Kiarostami's films, cameras and cars are similar machines. People use them to single things out: a car has its destination, a camera has its subject. This film and 1992's Life and Nothing More... especially involve the use of cars, each consisting of a person's journey driving on winding roads through mountainous terrain.
The one in this film, Mr. Badii, drives around looking for people to talk to so he can ask them to do a job for him. He intends to kill himself. He's dug a hole under a small tree just off the road, far from any sites where people would be. He'll lie down there at night, then at dawn, his hired hand will show up and check to see if he succeeded in ending his life. If they find him alive, they're to help him out of the hole, and then both parties will go their separate ways. If they don't, they're to bury him under 20 spadefuls of earth. Either way, they'll be paid 200,000 tomans.
Badii doesn't want just anyone for the job. The candidates he finds are, unsurprisingly, reluctant to get involved once they find out what he wants them to do. He spends a great deal of time trying to convince each of them. We don't know exactly what he's looking for in a candidate, just that he asks them to take the duty personally—though he also doesn't want them to ask questions about it.
Visually, Taste of Cherry is beautiful in a way that feels strangely ambivalent. The film takes place in a hilly landscape just past the edge of Tehran. When Badii decides to take a break from his search, he stops at a construction site. He watches his own shadow next to the shadows of the machines and dirt falling from them, and sits in the middle of a rising dust cloud. At other times, we can see the city a few miles away, its presence massive but quiet:
We don't know why he wants to die, and it's tempting to try to figure it out by interpreting this imagery. But when you turn your attention to these scenes, what comes through above all is how Badii silently takes it all in. The images don't explain the pain he's living with, but we can see how part of the way he deals with it is to sit down and try to be consumed by the experience of viewing something huge, beautiful, and mysterious.
Again, Kiarostami shows us the role of cars as tools people use to single things out, and in doing so he reminds us that these things are singled out from some larger context. There's always something a car passes by on the way to its destination, and always something a camera leaves out of frame. Kiarostami has performed other experiments in illustrating this. In Life and Nothing More... we see out the window of a car as it starts and stops according to the whims of the people inside. In that film, the characters start out with certain expectations and move forward under the guidance of their own attentive faculties. Their encounters with the unexpected send them on detours, and they start looking for new paths to their original destination. The camera still singles something out, but it gets there by encounters, not just one person's ideas.
But the aims of the characters in that film don't generate the discomfort that Badii's melancholy does, especially when it's left so mysterious. And with the extended break he takes after the second time he fails to convince someone to take the job, we can see it's not easy for him to keep up the search either. When the film gazes off into the distance, it does so with ambivalence. Maybe a destination for all this wandering is out there, but what chance is there to find it in such an expanse? Meanwhile, the ground beneath us is slipping away, turning to loose dirt tumbling over the slopes.
The film ends by breaking the fourth wall, showing us footage of the camera crew and the actors while Kiarostami directs. I've seen people complain about this ending. Some find it pointless. Others find it highly offensive, cheating them out of a story about a man experiencing profound pain. But these objections assume that the point of this is to say that everything was fake, that the effect of this display should be "distancing." I appreciate Jonathan Rosenbaum's response to this, arguing that it was only "distancing" if one comes to the film with certain expectations. What we've seen isn't fake. There are many people Badii didn't speak to and places he didn't go, which are nevertheless real. Taste of Cherry is an excerpt of something much larger than itself, and acknowledging this does not have to "distance" the viewer.
Badii attempts to interface with the world through dialogue. He does not decide who he encounters, so to find the right person for the job, he has to try to develop a relationship that works for him. This film illustrates how, in our dialogues, we attempt to create something to make up for what is left out of frame.
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