Iran, France, 1997
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
With Homayoun Ershadi (Mr. Badii), Abdolrahman Bagheri (Mr. Bagheri), Safar Ali Moradi (the soldier), Mir Hossein Noori (the seminarian)
The film features the tropes of a road movie but if the white SUV rides endlessly dirty roads it remains in fact inside a small area, going on round circles, winding through the same hairpin bends, driving along the same quarries. The point is not to reach another destination or to explore a new land and neither is it to run away or to roam aimlessly, waiting for a great life-changing event. The driver, Mr. Badii, has a purpose, as he is looking for someone to do a peculiar job he needs to get done the next day. But as his quest proves quite difficult and as questions are raised and stinging comments made the road trip gets a moral edge: the road movie turns out to become a philosophical debate.
Part of his difficulty is self-imposed: as he tours the streets of the busy city he is hailed and called out by idle young men desperate to get a day of work, a vivid reminder of the dire straits of the Iranian economy, but he disdains the offers. Stern and forbidding, barely responsive to kids’ remarks as they play around, even if he did ask them some questions, Mr. Badii drives around a long time before daring to hail a laborer. Clearly he is choosy and cautious. The laborer rebuffs him even before telling much about his plan and walks away.
Three other encounters follow and end in failure. It is first a timid conscript from a Kurdish area who gets scared and runs away from the SUV, then a security guard who is a migrant from Afghanistan who has not time for a talk but explains he has a companion more available living nearby, and finally this other man, who is in fact a fellow Afghan immigrant and a seminarian who gets on the car, talks with Mr. Badii, and sticking to his principles politely refuses to help him. Then Mr. Badii would park his car near a quarry and walks desultorily amid the construction vehicles, eventually sitting down in the midst of clouds of dust caused by diggers and trucks around him, a poignant picture of a lonesome and distraught man. A worker would curtly asks him to go: he resigns himself to move and gets on his car. The shot is cut into a wider shot showing the car riding with another conversation on in the soundtrack: this is a sharp and sudden narrative change, an astonishing jump in time – the ellipsis is bewildering. When this new passenger appeared and after how many minutes or perhaps hours remain impossible to figure out, but it can still be conceived that the quest of Mr. Badii has remained difficult, perhaps with other fruitless encounters.
But this new conversation, which is even longer than the others, with a talker who appears remarkably late in the editing, revealing then he is a much older man than those Mr. Badii met previously, and far more challenging, as Mr. Bagheri tries with personal anecdotes and poetic ideas to deter the driver from carrying out his plan, leads to a success. Mr. Bagheri, who needs money to buy the medicine his son urgently needs, would do the job. But that does not bring the bizarre and testing road trip to an end right away.
In new scenes, the film shows that far from being relieved Mr. Badii becomes even more anxious and unsure about what to do next. It is with real frenzy and a degree of resignation that he carries out his plan: to leave his apartment in the middle of the night, to go to one of the quarries he toured the previous day and, after gulping too many sleeping pills, to lie down in a hole near a cherry tree, the spot he has showed to his passengers, the self-designed place of his burial. As a storm disturbs the tranquility and darkness of the night, he waits for death to come, perhaps, and for Mr. Bagheri to perform that so peculiar job – first to check out if Mr. Badii is still alive and if he is really dead then to throw dirt and pebbles over his body.
What the actor playing the lead character artfully expresses at one point, with a voice, a stare, a mien hard to forget, is an intense, paralyzing suffering, the kind of deep-seated and searing angst that could drive someone to choose to kill themselves, make actually suicide such a conspicuous and irresistible call. The reasons causing such a state are left here unsaid: there is no background story, what happened to Mr. Badii and what he experiences would remain beyond the frame and beyond the words exchanged in the film. The soldier would not ask much anyway, the seminarian would hear and watch the pain but ignore them, clinging to the Quran teachings, Mr. Bagheri would be more sympathetic and understand better but he points to his interlocutor that suicide is too easy an answer to troubles – if everybody acted like Mr. Badii, he muses, nobody would be still alive on Earth then – and it deprives the people from the wonderful images, sensations, and feelings the world can offer, from watching a fiery dawn to tasting cherries and berries, to entertain hope. But arguments feel pointless as Mr. Badii displays such a resolute hopelessness.
Yet his plan does include the possibility that the sleeping pills may fail – that is why checking up if he is alive is the first thing to do. And checking up must not be a perfunctory task: he frantically insists that Mr. Bagheri does his utmost to be sure he is dead. Waiting for the moment when he must go, Mr. Badii comes across as completely panicking instead of being ready to do what he has long wished to do. And his face in the hole is inscrutable: so the question is, was he that ready to die? Could it be Mr. Bagheri, who is a taxidermist in a museum, what a teasing coincidence, utter words that upset Mr. Badii?
It is impossible to know: the film does not show what happens at dawn. It remains the portrait of a tortured soul seeking help for a self-destruction that may be a relief but still feels like an egregious mistake to many. In a world of dust, aridity (vegetation is rare in the hills where the SUV rides), and destruction (the diggers and the holes), Mr. Badii is a powerless figure wishing to go away for good. But it is not that simple and anyway cannot be. The conversations challenge him and point to the audience how unsatisfactory his plans are and how unconvincing his rhetoric is, even as his suffering is plain to see and his drive genuine and pressing.
As the camera is cleverly positioned inside the car, capturing either the driver or the passenger, and switches to a wider view of the trip while keeping track of the awkward conversations, “Ta’m e guilass – Taste of Cherry” amounts to be an engrossing philosophical debate underpinned by a deep compassion for human beings, inviting the audience to contemplate how to give life a meaning.
The ending is then puzzling, something of an absurdity, a damp squib. Switching to grainy video images, it shows director Abbas Kiarostami and his crew wrapping up the shooting. If the audience had forgot the film was a fiction, the final shots are the crudest way to remind them that the journey they witnessed was just a fit of imagination (which happened to be improvised most of the time). But it took many people and great effort to make it: ending the shooting may be a relief but still feels like a job that needed to get done and was also a pleasure to do. Bringing back so bluntly the audience, after the heartbreaking tension and the serious questioning they watched, to this factual reality may be the radical rupture they needed but also points to the passion that underpinned the idea of the film in the first place, the reason why Kiarostami and so many others worked, and what Mr. Badii was lacking in reality – a sense of purpose, a passion to satisfy, a nice work to be completed. Or perhaps it is just a self-indulging sequence to end the film in a tongue-in-cheek way when in fact, no end is possible – it is not just that Mr. Badii’s fate belongs only to him but that tragic matters of life and death would always crop up and people would always struggle to give answers.