Taste of Cherry

Director:  Abbas Kiarostami
Year Released:  1997
Rating:  2.0

Iran director Abbas Kiarostami’s extremely well-received “masterpiece” (according to Phillip Lopate, Jay Carr and a few others), which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes (it shared the award with Imamura’s “The Eel”), is as pretentious a film can be these days. Here’s a quick recap: a man, for some reason, wants to kill himself – and the way he wants to die is by taking too many sleeping pills and lying in a hole. He needs an accomplice, though, to come the next day and cover him with dirt if he’s dead. For the 90+ minute running time, he drives around in his truck trying to find someone to be his accomplice for a bit of money. At first, I thought: why doesn’t he just use a gun? Or hang himself? But oh no, Kiarostami’s trying to make some sort of universal message about the preciousness of life and it’s all about how we look at things, etc. Unfortunately, he hasn’t presented that message in an interesting way: he’d rather bore us to death with endless, empty shots of the main character driving. I get the feeling (from the fact that Kiarostami included footage of himself at the end of the film and from the interview conducted with him) that the director of this “film” is convinced he’s a genius, and the simplicity of the shots and the bland dialogue are supposed to reinforce the symbolism of it all … and that we, the audience, will walk away from this film astonished at what a visionary he is. Tarkovsky you’re not. (Note: I admire Roger Ebert for his review of this film, which he gave one star and complained about how bored he was. Most of his peers felt the film was a masterpiece, and consider Kiarostami a phenom, but he stuck to his guns. Bravo.)

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