Taste of Cherry · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man drives. The camera rides the dashboard and watches his face, and behind him, past the passenger glass, the ochre hills of west Tehran unspool in a long brown ribbon. Mr. Badii is looking for someone. He has a Land Rover, a little money, and a task he can't say out loud at first: come to a pit on this hillside tomorrow morning, call my name, and if I don't answer, cover me with twenty shovelfuls of earth. That is the whole plot. And yet almost nothing in the film behaves like plot.

Start with how Kiarostami films a conversation. Badii and his passenger sit side by side and look forward, out at the road, almost never at each other. The standard grammar of screen talk — your face, my face, your face — is simply withheld. We read the men through posture, vocal pitch, the oblique glance. And because the lens so often sits where the windshield would be, the person Badii is really addressing is us. We are structurally cast as the one being asked to bury him.

Here is where a companion named Deleuze earns his place. He split cinema into two regimes. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it; action closes the gap, and the cutting hurries the chain along — perceive, decide, do. By that logic Taste of Cherry should be an action film. Badii has a goal and a deadline. He drives, he recruits, he negotiates. But watch what the action actually does: nothing. No deed resolves his situation, because his situation is already decided. The film instead settles into what Deleuze called pure optical and sound situations — opsigns and sonsigns — moments where a character, and we with him, can only look and listen, with no act available that would make a difference. The soundtrack is almost entirely the world itself: wind, engine, gravel grinding under tyres, no music to tell us how to feel. Ershadi, an architect Kiarostami met in traffic and not a trained actor, gives a face that registers everything and discharges none of it. That is the time-image: time felt directly, as endurance, instead of time used up as the measure of an action.

Deleuze has a word for a protagonist like this. Not an agent but a seer — a voyant — someone who watches and bears what he sees rather than mastering it. Badii drives in order to be talked to. The hillside he keeps returning to is a quarry near Golak, and Kiarostami shoots it on long lenses that flatten the terrain into scored, dun emptiness. The dossier puts it exactly: the earth is made to feel inescapable, present as both landscape and destiny. This is an any-space-whatever — a place drained of its function as a setting, no longer the stage where a story happens, just void and slope and the small dark vehicle crawling across it. And the drives themselves are dead time: scenes that run long without intercutting, the boredom and duration of the road treated as the dramatic substance rather than as something to be trimmed away.

Three passengers, three refusals of death — a young Kurdish soldier who flees, an Afghan seminarian who argues religious prohibition, and finally Mr. Bagheri, a taxidermist who agrees but spends the drive trying to talk Badii back into living. The trip transforms nothing in Badii; this is the voyage form Deleuze traces, the journey that modifies no one, which Kiarostami inherits straight from Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia. The whole genealogy is here in the craft. De Sica and Bicycle Thieves taught him to cast real faces from their own lives. Bresson's 'models' taught him the flat, withheld delivery where meaning accrues by accumulation, not expression. Ozu taught him to cut past the climax and let a landscape hold the screen. Antonioni, in L'Avventura, taught him that a story can run on an event it never explains — the disappeared woman who becomes, here, the death we are never shown.

Because the film does not show it. It goes to black on the darkened hillside, Badii lying in his pit, and withholds the one fact a suicide narrative is built to deliver. Then comes the rupture. The screen returns — but as grainy consumer video, springtime, green grass, soldiers resting, and Kiarostami himself directing Ershadi, alive, the crew visible, a piece of music finally allowed in. The fiction is detonated from inside. Bazin's old neorealist faith was that the camera does not lie; Kiarostami honors that faith and breaks it in the same gesture. We never learn whether Badii dies, because the question has been moved to a different floor of reality. This is what Deleuze called the powers of the false — not deception but a creative undecidability, two truths that can't be reconciled both left standing. The coda is a lectosign, an image that stops being self-evident and asks to be read.

And notice what actually argues Badii out of death inside the fiction: not doctrine but a story. Bagheri recounts a morning he too meant to die, and was recalled to life by the taste of a mulberry. A man caught in the act of legending himself — Deleuze's fabulation — telling a tale that remade him. The film's case for living is an act of storytelling, which is exactly what the coda confesses the whole film to be.

Watch it again for the windshield. Kiarostami's invention was to trust duration, the indirect face, and the withheld fact so completely that absence becomes the engine. The question he hands you isn't whether Badii lived. It's why a borrowed taste — a cherry, a mulberry — should be enough, and whether you'd answer the door if he came to ask.