Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Taste of Cherry
1997 · Abbas Kiarostami · Taste of Cherry on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch where the camera sits inside the Land Rover. (camera)
Payvar mounts it on the dashboard or the rear bench, often holding Badii's face while the world scrolls past the passenger window. You are given the seat beside him.
Payoff: The proposition ends up pointed at you. Structurally, you are the person being asked to do the job.
Watch how rarely the two men look at each other. (staging)
Driver and passenger both face the road. Kiarostami withholds the usual exchange of faces, so you read each scene from posture, vocal pitch, and the occasional sideways glance.
Payoff: With the faces turned away the talk has to carry everything, and you listen harder than you otherwise would.
Listen to the engine, the wind, and the gravel under the tires. (sound)
The soundtrack is the world itself. Dialogue is recorded without studio cleaning and nothing is scored. A drive sounds exactly like a drive for the length of the film.
Payoff: Nothing tells you how to feel about any conversation, so what you make of it stays your decision.
Watch Ershadi's face while a passenger talks at him. (performance)
Ershadi was an architect rather than an actor, met by Kiarostami in Tehran traffic. He takes everything in and releases none of it, and the uncertainty in him is real.
Payoff: Badii drives in order to be talked to. What you watch is a man receiving arguments he does not intend to act on. In the reading: the seer (voyant). The reading calls him a seer: someone who looks and endures what he sees rather than acting to change it.
Count how long a single drive runs without a cut. (cutting)
Scenes in the car go on without intercutting. The boredom and the duration of the road are treated as the dramatic material rather than as something to trim away.
Payoff: The film spends its running time on time passing, which is what gives the passengers' talk room to land.
Once you have seen it
Track what each of the three passengers offers against dying. (structure)
A young Kurdish soldier refuses and runs. An Afghan seminarian argues religious prohibition. Bagheri, the taxidermist, agrees to the job and then tells a story about a mulberry.
Payoff: Three kinds of argument get tried in order, and only the one made out of sensory memory gets any traction. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls Bagheri's story fabulation: a man legending himself, telling the tale that made him into who he is.
Watch the picture change from film to grainy video. (structure)
After the hillside goes dark, the screen comes back as consumer video in springtime: green grass, soldiers resting, Kiarostami directing Ershadi, the crew in shot, and music at last.
Payoff: The fiction is taken apart from inside, and the question you were holding moves to a different floor of reality. In the reading: the readable image. The reading calls the coda a lectosign: an image that stops being self-evident and has to be read instead.
Look at the bare ochre and gray earth around the road. (setting)
The Tehran periphery is quarry roads, dust, and scored slopes with almost nothing growing. Long lenses flatten the hills so the Land Rover looks embedded in the dirt.
Payoff: The ground Badii wants to be covered with is on screen in nearly every wide shot from the first reel.
Watch where the film cuts away instead of showing a consequence. (cutting)
Kiarostami edited the film himself and drops out exactly where conventional storytelling would hold on. Actions begin and the picture leaves before they finish.
Payoff: You are never told why Badii wants to die and never shown what he does. The withholding is the design.
Carry this in: Both men face the road, not each other. Read the scene from voices and posture instead of faces.