Taste of Cherry · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Taste of Cherry is among cinema's most sustained realizations of the time-image: Badii does not act so much as endure. His circular drives through Tehran's ochre-and-grey periphery — Kiarostami draining the landscape to near-monochrome until earth feels like both fact and fate — never build toward resolution; they accumulate. The sensory-motor chain that powers classical cinema has broken, and what remains are opsigns & sonsigns, pure optical and sonic situations that arrest rather than advance. The Land Rover's windshield becomes a screen within the screen, and each passenger's face emerges as an optical event: the Kurdish soldier's silence, the seminary student's invocation of religious prohibition, the Azerbaijani taxidermist's quiet memory of a cherry branch pulled at dawn — all arrive as sonic situations that touch Badii's will without mechanically redirecting it. The car moves through any-space-whatever — the quarried hillsides and construction sites on the city's fringe, spaces stripped of the social coordinates that would make them legible — and this disconnection mirrors a man who has already, in some sense, evacuated his own existence. The structural template comes directly from Rossellini: as in Viaggio in Italia, each of Badii's three encounters modulates his existential situation without resolving it, the journey functioning as Socratic inquiry rather than plot engine, arrival perpetually deferred.