Burial detail

Abbas on the abyss in Taste of Cherry

by Peter Keough

TASTE OF CHERRY. Directed and written by Abbas Kiarostami. With Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolhossein Bagheri, Afshin Bakhtiari, Ali Moradi, Hossein Noori, Ahmad Ansari, Hamid Massomi, and Elham Imani. A Zeitgeist Films release. At the Avon

Suicide, so Albert Camus insists in his seminal essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," is the only philosophical problem. It's a cinematic problem as well -- apart from employing it as a handy plot device, few films (Louis Malle's The Fire Within comes to mind) have attempted to plumb the convolutions of despair and reason that compel a person to self-annihilation. Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry does not resolve the philosophical problem, but he does provide one of the most harrowing, luminous, and ultimately uplifting depictions of the human spirit in extremis on film.

Not that the great Iranian director seemed a likely candidate for a movie on this subject. Although his simplicity veils complexity and sophistication, a childlike exuberance and plangent optimism buoy his works, and indeed children are predominant. And then there are the constraints of the Muslim theocracy under which he must operate, in which suicide is one of many artistic taboos. (Cherry has yet to be screened in its country of origin; it was allowed to appear at Cannes, where it won the Palme d'Or, only after a last-minute reprieve from the censors.)

Yet despite their seeming innocence, Kiarostami's previous works do labor under a Sisyphean repetitiousness, especially in the recent, so-called "Earthquake" trilogy by which he is best known to Western viewers. In the delightful child's tale Where Is the Friend's House? (1987), a little boy asks a series of strangers where his schoolmate lives so he can return a notebook. The puffed-up adults send him on increasingly labyrinthine wild-goose chases. The sense of an inescapable maze increases in the trilogy's next two installments, films about the making of films in which Kiarostami returns to the city in which the first picture was shot, a city since leveled in an earthquake, to trace the lives of the survivors.

The hero of Cherry seems like the schoolboy of Friend's House, only his mode of transport is a Range Rover and he wears the expensive clothes and beaten demeanor of middle age. His name is Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), and what he seeks is far more suspicious than the goal of his young counterpart. In downtown Teheran, he cruises crowds of unemployed laborers. They press their faces to the glass (much of Cherry is shot through car windows, the abiding frame of the 20th century), begging for work. None of them seems fit for the "job" Mr. Badii has in mind.

He sets out for the city's outskirts, which appear as a vast, terraced desert inhabited only by earthmovers, outcasts, and children playing in garbage heaps and derelict vehicles; Kiarostami shoots it in M.C. Escher-like extreme long shots, capturing the suffocation and radiance, the isolation and intimacy. In this post-technological Beckett landscape Mr. Badii overhears a young man (Hamid Massomi) on a pay phone lamenting his financial losses. Mr. Badii pursues him, offering a ride and money; the young man, no doubt suspecting a pick-up, offers to smash in the stranger's face.

Mr. Badii is looking not for the pleasures of the flesh, however, but for his release from it. Like Hamlet, he's stymied by what happens after death -- namely, what's to become of his body? So in what is planned as the last day of his life he offers a small fortune to selected members of Iranian society's detritus -- a Kurdish army recruit (Ali Moradi); an Afghan security guard at a cement plant (Ahmad Ansari) and his seminary-student friend (Hossein Noori); a Turkish taxidermist (Adbolhossein Bagheri) with an ailing son -- in return for their promise to lay his body to rest in a roadside slit trench he has dug himself. Each in turn expresses bewilderment and compassion before trying to argue him out of his plan.

It sounds schematic, but not for a moment is the urgency of the matter doubted. Ershadi is at once scary, pathetic, and otherworldly, an undead revenant longing for surcease and dreading it. His instructions to potential assistants sound almost like lines from a folktale: "Look at that hole. Come back tomorrow at 6 a.m. and say three times `Mr. Badii. Mr. Badii. Mr. Badii.' If I answer, give me your hand and help me out of the hole."

And if he doesn't answer? Mr. Badii never explains what's behind his decision because, he insists, no one can understand, but after spending 90 minutes in a car with him you start to get the idea. Then there is Kiarostami's technique for shooting dialogue: the two speakers are never in the frame at the same time, and that's because the director always plays the part of the offscreen interlocutor, making the debate as tormented and solitary as it indeed must be.

Mostly, though, it's in the details that Cherry overwhelms with its truth. The line of troops that suddenly appears over a ridge, chanting. A beautiful cowled woman (Elham Imani) who asks Mr. Badii to take a photo of her and her boyfriend -- the man at the pay phone he had accosted earlier. And the taste of the title fruit itself, a taste one of Mr. Badii's passengers insists once saved him from suicide. It's only after considering the alternative, Cherry suggests, that life's savor can fully be appreciated. Or after experiencing a masterpiece like this film.

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A taste of Kiarostami

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