One night, I could not get to sleep and was feeling unwell. Best advice usually is to get out of bed and do something else in another room until you feel tired. I felt like starting to watch something and as soon as I felt sleepy, I’d finish it the next day. I don’t mind watching things in instalments. Browsing the Criterion Channel, I picked Taste Of Cherry (1997). This turned out to be the perfect choice. I think I wanted to explore more of director Abbas Kiarostami’s work (I’ve only seen Like Someone In Love) and was inspired by a recent post I saw of him being interviewed, talking about how he preferred “the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater.” Taste Of Cherry is meditative, containing scenes of long conversations or landscapes where a car drives around slowly. It’s about Mr Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) who is doing the driving, going around circles in Tehran, interviewing people to see if someone would take money for – well, he wants to take an overdose of sleeping pills and lie down in a hole in the dusty fields. He needs someone to cover him up with a shovel the next morning. No reason is explicitly stated for Badii’s decision to die; we bring to it our own reading of Ershadi’s performance. An amazing performance considering Ershadi was a non-actor, and his face brings so much emotion to the role. There is great work with the non-actors that fill out the cast, particularly three people Badii talks to at length while driving – a young soldier (Safar Ali Moradi), an Afghahi seminarian (Mir Hossein Noori) and a Turkish taxidermist (Abdolrahman Bagheri). I did need to return to sleep two thirds of the way through, but was grateful to experience the rest the next afternoon. I just felt it was a very thoughtful, artful experience, which seems deceptively simple yet is open in many interpretations, particularly the unusual ending. Taste Of Cherry also stands as the first Iranian film to win the Palme D’Or at Cannes. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 