A Taste of Cherry

It is very hard to care for a character when you know almost nothing about them. You don't know what their central conflict is, you don't know anything about their life, and they insist on using people like they have no feelings or right to express their opinion.

Mr. Badii is driving around his city looking for someone to help him, the job he has is simple and the pay is good. He wants some one to come to a hole that he has dug near a tree in the outskirts of town, yell his name twice, if he doesn't respond fill the whole with 20 spadefuls of dirt and leave. If he does answer, help him out of the grave. As he drives around and meets people he sees a cross section of the country he lives in. Immigrants, low income laborers, and a man who works at the natural history museum.

We spend almost the whole time in the car as he drives around, he is rude to people, short with them. If they express their opinion at all he tells them he doesn't want to hear it, he just wants them to do this job. He calls these people his friends, he manipulates them, and asks so much of them for a monetary compensation. To everyone he talks to the money is meaningless, they only want to help him. Badii is a selfish, and careless man. He gets frustrated when people wont do his bidding, people who would be more likely to kill themselves than him, they live sad and hard lives where he seems well off. We never know why he wants to kill himself though, so I cant say much about that.

It has a terrible non-ending, I'm sure you can guess from reading this where the story ends, so we get no closure on the story. There are some great moments in it, but because of the ending those moments are meaningless, if the whole story is about the last day of his life, or a day he nearly made a huge mistake we need to know that, this cant be left open.

They do some very interesting stuff with lighting and composition, but because the film is almost entirely in his car it becomes repetitive quickly. They also put in hints for things that never happen, what a waste. Example: Whenever he gets to the site where he dug the hole we can hear an injured or lost puppy somewhere nearby crying. To me it would seem like to end it he would save the dogs life, thus saving his own, but no. Its never referred to.

I cant really recommend this to anyone, it drags to often, and it not story enough to be a feature length, I think as a 45 minute short it would work very well, but at more than double that it simply flips about trying to run the clock out. 5/10 stars.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Actors: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Mir Hossein Noori