Taste of Cherry

Taste of Cherry (Persian: طعم گیلاس..., Ta’m-e gīlās...) is a 1997 Iranian minimalist drama film written, produced, edited and directed by Abbas Kiarostami, and starring Homayoun Ershadi as a middle-aged Tehran man who drives through a city suburb in search of someone willing to carry out the task of burying him after he commits suicide. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, which it shared with The Eel.
Badii, a middle-aged man, drives through Tehran looking for someone to do a job for him, for which he offers a large sum of money. During his drives with prospective candidates, Badii reveals that he plans to kill himself and has already dug the grave. He tells the people he is soliciting to go to the spot he has chosen the next morning, and either help him up if he has chosen to live or bury him if he has chosen to die. He does not discuss why he wants to commit suicide.
His first recruit is a young, shy Kurdish soldier who refuses to do the job and flees from Badii's car. His second recruit is an Afghan seminarist who also declines because he has religious objections to suicide. The third is Bagheri, an Azeri taxidermist. He is willing to help Badii because he needs the money for his sick child. He tries to convince Badii not to commit suicide and reveals that he too wanted to commit suicide in 1960 but chose to live when, after failing in his attempt, he tasted mulberries which dropped from a tree. Bagheri reveals that he then went home with the mulberries and gave them to his wife, who enjoyed them. He continues to discuss what he perceives to be the beauty of life, including sunrises, the moon, and stars. Bagheri promises to throw dirt on Badii if he finds him dead in the morning. Badii drops him back at his workplace but suddenly runs back to meet him, requesting that in the morning Bagheri should confirm if he is actually dead by throwing some stones at him and jolting him awake in case he is asleep.
That night, Badii lies in his grave while a thunderstorm begins. After a long blackout, the film ends by breaking the fourth wall with camcorder footage of Kiarostami and the film crew filming Taste of Cherry, leaving Badii's choice unknown.
The film is minimalist in that it is shot primarily with long takes; the pace is leisurely and there are long periods of ambient (background) sound, which the closing sequence shows the crew recording. Mr. Badii is rarely shown in the same shot as the person he is talking to (this is partly because during the filming, director Kiarostami was sitting in the car's passenger seat).
The film does not include a background score, except for the ending titles. This features a trumpet piece, Louis Armstrong's 1929 adaptation of "St. James Infirmary Blues." The only other song featured in the film is "Khuda Bowad Yaret" (May God be your protector) by Afghan singer Ahmad Zaher, which is played in the background on a radio about 38 minutes into the film.
Taste of Cherry was awarded the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival in the year of its release, tied with Shohei Imamura's The Eel.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 83% based on 40 reviews, with the "critics consensus" reading, "Taste of Cherry's somewhat simple aesthetic belies a richly ambiguous character study with an impressively ambitious thematic scale." Rob Aldam of Backseat Mafia described the film as "an assured and studied meditation on the question of whether life is worth living". Matthew Lucas of From the Front Row wrote:
Stephen Holden of The New York Times called the film "simultaneously epic and precisely minuscule", writing that "it isn't until Badii meets the taxidermist that the film finds a lyrical voice to match its powerful visual imagery. His gorgeous, rough-hewn soliloquy about regaining his zest for life after trying to hang himself from a mulberry tree is a simple, eloquent parable of the senses opening to the refreshment of life's simple pleasures." According to Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic, "As the film's design becomes clear to us, a quiet spaciousness begins to inhabit it."
Of the minority of negative reviews, Roger Ebert's in The Chicago Sun-Times was the most scathing, giving the film 1 out of 4 stars. Ebert dismissed the film as "excruciatingly boring" and added,
Ebert later went on to add the film to a list of his most hated movies of all time.
In his own review of Kiarostami's film, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader awarded it a full four stars. Responding to Ebert's criticisms, Rosenbaum wrote:
Since the film's release, multiple other critics have also declared it a masterpiece; in the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound poll, six critics and two directors named Taste of Cherry one of the 10 best films ever made. It was also named the 9th best film of the 90s by Slant Magazine. About the ending and its detractors, Calum Marsh wrote:
On June 1, 1999, The Criterion Collection released the film onto DVD. On July 21, 2020, Criterion released the film on Blu-ray with a new 4K restoration.