There are plenty of miserablist films about suicide. Why does this one have such power? It is partly because Badii never invites sympathy or compassion in any conventional way: watching Taste of Cherry I feel gripped; I feel scared, but I don't feel sad – or not exactly. And it is partly because of the implications of what he has in mind. We think of suicidal people as desperate, so desperate, that they don't care who finds their body. But Badii does not want to be discovered; he wants his body never to be found; he wants his suicide to be a secret. He wants utter self-annihilation, and the pathos and wretchedness of his self-directed conspiracy are gripping.
Abbas Kiarostami's haunting and mysterious Taste of Cherry won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997; I first watched it a couple of years after that. A drawn, careworn but handsome and elegant Iranian man called Badii, played by the Iranian actor Homayoun Ershadi, drives around a stark Beckettian landscape in his Range Rover. He is looking for someone to help him take his own life. Badii never behaves in an obviously wretched or despairing manner; there are no cries or tears, and he never reveals the reason for what he intends to do.
The opening sequence is hypnotic, and unforgettably disturbing. We see Badii driving around Tehran's itinerant labour markets, looking for someone, sizing up the men he sees on street corners. They crowd round his car, puzzled, peering directly into the camera, asking if he wants men. "You want workers? Take one! Take two!" But something about these men displeases Badii and he drives on, up into the hills, where his ears prick up at the sound of a young man arguing on a payphone with his girlfriend about money. Badii starts to speak to this man, making small talk, with the slightly curt, coercive tone of a police officer.
What on earth does Badii want? Trade? Sex? He has the hunted look of someone looking for a prostitute, and this young man clearly suspects as much, telling him to be on his way or he will "smash his face in". Bizarrely, ironically, this same young man is to make a tiny cameo appearance in Badii's life at the very end of the film, a brilliantly understated moment.
Later, Badii will pick up a young soldier, doing his national service; he drives him to the shallow grave he has dug in a remote hillside, and reveals to this stunned squaddie the awful proposition. The plan is that later that night Badii will take a fatal dose of pills and lie in the grave waiting for death. The soldier merely has to come back at dawn, check that he's dead, and then bury him: just 20 shovelfuls of earth will do it. The man would then find a handsome cash payment waiting for him in the car.
I will never know what to think about the final scene of Taste of Cherry. Anticlimactic? Evasive? Yes, perhaps. But also incomparably strange, self-aware, and somehow very moving.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/apr/13/curzon-on-demand-taste-of-cherry
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