#45: Taste of Cherry
Goooood morning old friends and new!
Last week, I was so honored to have my newsletter featured on the front page of Substack’s site! I still have no idea how they found lil ol’ me in the haystack of all their newsletters, but it really made my week.
If you found my newsletter from there, welcome!! I’m SO glad you are hopping on this weird and endless journey with me. We are 45 movies deep and I’m just now starting to think, wait what IS the Criterion Collection? Like, as a concept? As an ethos? So that’s fun.
Welcome aboard and I hope you enjoy!
#45: Taste of Cherry
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Country: Iran
Year: 1997
Runtime: 99 minutes
Language: Persian
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
CW: Suicide, suicidal ideation
First things first, I have to reiterate the major trigger warning for suicide and suicidal ideation in this movie. Take care of yourself!
The film opens with a title card in Farsi that reads “In the name of God.”
A middle-aged man, Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) is driving slowly through Tehran, seemingly looking for someone.
A few men stop at his window and ask if he’s looking for laborers. He says no. He tries to pick up a man walking, telling him if he has money problems he can help him. The man tells him if he doesn’t leave him alone he’ll smash his face in.
This search goes on for a while until he picks up a young soldier (Safar Ali Moradi), who is originally from Kurdistan.
They talk about the young guy’s family and the conversation again turns to money; Badii wants to know if he is paid well. He offers him a well-paying job and that he’ll be back at the barracks in an hour. They go for a drive and Mr Badii recounts his fond memories of being in the military.
I remember wondering this both times I’ve seen this movie: is it intentional to make the viewer wonder or assume that Mr. Badii is cruising? And, if so, why?
The young man doesn’t say much in response, so Badii asks him if he’s shy which...does that question give any of my fellow introverts flashbacks to elementary school? Teachers on the first day of school and over confident 6th graders and someone’s boisterous dad. WOOF.
The soldier finally responds, “You’re taking me a long way. I need to know what you want.”
Badii tells him not to worry about the job, but to focus on the pay. But I’m with the soldier here, if you’re going to essentially kidnap me AND employ me, I’m gonna need numbers.
The soldier starts to get suspicious as they drive along a dirt road up a mountain. Badii stops the car and tells him to get out. He refuses.
Standing next to a tree and a large empty hole in the ground, Badii explains the job.
The next morning, the soldier should arrive at this hole. Inside will be Mr. Badii. The soldier should call his name twice, “Mr. Badii! Mr. Badii!” If he responds, help him out of the hole. If he doesn’t respond, he should put 20 spadefuls of dirt on top of him. The job will pay 200,000 tomans, which I calculated to be $47 in today’s USD, but that seems possibly very wrong, so DON’T QUOTE ME.
The first time I saw this movie, I didn’t totally understand what this all meant or what Mr. Badii was really asking. So, if you’re also not clear, this is why I am here. Badii is planning on taking his own life and wants the soldier to bury him if he decides to go through with it.
The soldier, still sitting in the car, tells him he’s not a gravedigger and won’t help him. Badii begs a LOT. And his reasons aren’t entirely off base, like, dead people get buried all the time! Dead people are being buried right now! Pretend you’re farming and I’m manure at the foot of a tree!
But ultimately, the soldier just doesn’t want to, which is a good enough reason, for the record.
Badii gets back in the car and the soldier leaps out and runs away.
Badii continues on his search until he finds a mostly empty construction site. At the site is an Afghan man working as a security guard for the site. He is making himself an omelet. Sitting on a hill a little bit in the distance is another man, the security guard’s friend. This man is a seminarian (Mir Hossein Noori), also from Afghanistan. Badii tries to talk the security guard into taking a drive, but he can’t leave his post. Badii decides to pursue the seminarian instead. He picks him up on the hill.
They make small talk about seminaries and why he’s in Tehran. Badii explains suicide to him, telling him that he can’t relate to how what he feels. Badii starts to tear up and the seminarian explains why suicide goes against his beliefs: man must not torment the body God gave him, being unhappy is a sin because you end up hurting people and yourself, etc. Badii says if he wanted a lecture, he would have sought out a person who’d already completed their studies, which is pretty sassy. Also, God granted people the option of suicide so he must not be totally opposed as a man of God, he argues.
They stop at the grave next to the tree and the seminarian gets out to take a look. Badii explains he’s decided to take all of his sleeping pills tonight, lay down in the hole, and fall asleep. He tells him the plan about the money and the 20 spadefuls of dirt.
The seminarian, as predicted, doesn’t want to participate because the Quran says killing yourself is the same as killing another person. He declines his offer and when Badii returns to the construction site to drop him off, the seminarian asks him to come up and eat the omelette with his friend. My first thought is it is very bold to offer another man’s omelet to another man, which told me I was getting bored. Badii tells him eggs are bad for him and drives away.
Badii finds another construction site where he watches a machine dump dirt into a hole.
He sits down and seems to fall asleep until a worker wakes him and tells him to move his car.
Cut to Badii in the car with a new person he’s recruited for the job, after having told him the details. The man is an elderly Azeri taxidermist named Mr. Bagheri (Abdolrahman Bagheri). Mr. Bagheri has a very sick child so he’s initially enticed by the money.
As they drive away from the grave, Mr. Bagheri tells Badii that he, too, once attempted suicide after his marriage ended. He threw a rope over a mulberry tree branch, but after tasting the mulberries, seeing the sunrise, and children going off to school, he felt happy and knew he wasn’t ready to die. He took the mulberries home to his wife who also enjoyed them.
“I left to kill myself and came back with mulberries,” he says.
He has a very long monologue where he tells Badii everyone on earth has problems and encourages him to share his. He says, “The world isn’t the way you see it. You have to change your outlook to change the world.” Badii says nothing and the man continues on, trying to talk him out of it. He mentions all the things he may miss: sunrises, fruit, the seasons, and washing his face. “You want to give up the taste of the cherries?”
Before he gets dropped off at this job, Mr. Bagheri sings him a song in Turkish.
He agrees to come to the grave in the morning and cover Badii with dirt. Badii drops him off and drives away, but eventually turns around and goes back to the man’s job, frantically looking for him.
He finds the man working and as he waits for him to come outside, Badii looks across the city and then to a flock of birds on the sand.
Mr. Bagheri meets him and tells him he’s busy.
Badii has come back to tell him, “When you come in the morning, bring two small stones to throw at me to make sure I’m not asleep.” Badii asks him several times to promise he will do everything he can to make sure he’s not still alive before throwing the dirt on him. Mr. Bagheri agrees.
Badii sits on a bench and watches the sun set.
He eventually goes home and we only see him through his window, pacing around. His cab arrives, he puts on a coat, empties his pockets, grabs a bag, and leaves. He is dropped off at the tree where he sits and smokes until the cab is totally out of view.
He lays down in the grave as it begins to thunderstorm. The screen cuts to black.
The next scene is real footage of the crew filming the movie.
The End.
I don’t know how many times I’ve said this in this newsletter, but it’s a real part of this “project” so it needs to be said: I was very tired when I watched this movie and it definitely had an impact on my viewing experience. That is to say, I was pretty bored and ready for it to be over.
HOWever, I do remember really liking this movie the first time I saw it so I’m not going to go off one sleepy Wednesday (that’s actually probably good advice in general?).
I’ve been thinking a lot about the “message” of this movie, of course. Is it pro-suicide or pro-life? What happens to Mr. Badii in the end and does it even matter? What to make of the final scene of the crew filming?
Ultimately, I can see how this movie could be read as pro-suicide. It’s safe to assume that Mr. Badii does die in the end and is buried with the help of another person. It can also be assumed that we are expected to sympathize with the main character and his desire to die and even think he made some good points about his right to do so. I actually think this is incredibly powerful and important, to give a raw and genuine voice to those struggling with thoughts of suicide.
But it also says a lot that the last man to talk with Mr. Badii, Mr. Bagheri, was opposed to suicide. He talked mostly about life and all the things to be missed: the mulberries, the sunsets, the sounds of laughter. He’d been to the edge of wanting to die and was able to come back from it. Yeah, he agreed to help Mr. Badii, but he was also using the money to help his sick son, so he was still on the side of life. And yeah, his advice was basically the modern equivalent of toxic positivity, but he was, I think, doing his best to tether Mr. Badii to the world he saw. A man who left his house wanting to die and came back with mulberries is, I think, the loudest voice Kiarostami wants us to hear.
Next up is The Most Dangerous Game from 1932. My initial reaction was, of course, UGH. BUT THEN I realized it’s a pre-Code film and am now THRILLED to see what sexy, scary, freaky stuff goes on in this rendition. Join me, please!
XOXO,
Steph