Ta'm e guilass (1997)

User Rating:

7.4/10   

Director:

Abbas Kiarostami

Writer:

Abbas Kiarostami (writer)

Release Date:

30 January 1998 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

Middle-aged Mr.Badii is planning to commit suicide and desperately seeks anyone to assist him - he has already dug out the grave in the mountains...

Plot Keywords:

Suicide | Hole | Long Take | Iran | Suicide Attempt

Awards:

3 wins & 2 nominations

Cast

Homayoun Ershadi	...	Mr. Badii
Abdolrahman Bagheri	...	Mr. Bagheri
Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari	...	Soldier
Safar Ali Moradi	...	The soldier
Mir Hossein Noori	...	The seminarian
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Ahmad Ansari

Also Known As:

A Taste of Cherry (USA)
Le goût de la cerise (France)
Taste of Cherry (USA) (DVD box title)

Runtime:

95 min

Country:

France | Iran

Language:

Persian

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Certification:

Iceland:L | South Korea:12 | Argentina:13 | Brazil:12 | Finland:S | Hungary:14 | Portugal:M/12 | Singapore:PG | Spain:13 | Sweden:Btl | UK:PG | Australia:PG

Filming Locations:

Tehran, Iran

Company:

Abbas Kiarostami Productions

Trivia:

Chosen by "Les Cahiers du cinéma" (France) as one of the 10 best pictures of 1997 (#06).

Quotes:

Mr. Bagheri: If you look at the four seasons, each season brings fruit. In summer, there's fruit, in autumn, too. Winter brings different fruit and spring, too. No mother can fill her fridge with such a variety of fruit for her children. No mother can do as much for her children as God does for His creatures. You want to refuse all that? You want to give it all up? You want to give up the taste of cherries?

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Wo de fu qin mu qin (1999)

Failed arthouse experiment

This is a little more interesting when you know that most of it was improvised with Kiarostami sitting in the driver's seat talking to the other actors. But like most purely improvised films, there's a rather low ratio of insights to the amount of screen time spent struggling to come up with something interesting. (Actually, only one of the characters really manages to be interesting at all.) Likewise, some of the shots of Mr. Badii driving around aimlessly have a certain Antonioniesque hypnotic effect, but most of them look no more interesting than random video you might have shot yourself in the industrial part of town.

There are critics who call this kind of untouched-by-art realism genius, who say that Kiarostami is making us think, reconsider the very nature of cinema, and so on. To my mind, the message of the film-- the taste of cherry makes life worth living-- is no more or less profound than, say, Woody Allen rattling off a few of the things that make life worth living in Manhattan, or the epiphany the kid in American Beauty gets from a plastic bag. (Likewise the message that it's all only a movie. Never woulda guessed.) And critics who find such a message shallow in a piece of slick entertainment, but deep when it's in a deliberately unentertaining art film, need to reexamine their critical principles, or lighten up a little-- or at least go see again the work of real art Kiarostami alludes to in his title, Wild Strawberries, which has more depth of characterization and emotional richness in any five minutes than this manages to scrounge up in an hour and a half.