When released in the United States, Abbas Kiarostami's tone poem of suicide, A Taste of Cherry, was greeted with a mixed reception by the film critics, which is funny because for this long struggling film critic, suicide is never far from the mind. One would think with all the film critics in the United States, A Taste of Cherry would come as a breath of fresh air, covering a subject near and dear to a critic's heart. However, despite winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the film ended up being cherished by some critics (Jonathan Rosenbaum said that the film "represents life in all its rich complexity") and poo-poohed by others (Roger Ebert called the film "excruciatingly boring"). But for this particular low rent critical drone, A Taste of Cherry is a film that percolates beneath the soul and becomes richer the further its memory recedes from the initial viewing. In other words, it has staying power.

The simple story concerns a middle-aged man, Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), circling around the outskirts of Tehran in a Range Rover searching for a stranger who will help him commit suicide. Badii wants to strike a deal with an obliging party: He will kill himself that night by taking a handful of sleeping pills in a construction pit and the next morning his associate will return to the site of his demise and call his name. If he answers, he is to help him out the hole; if not, he is to shovel 20 piles of earth over his body.

Kiarostami brilliantly sets up this situation, with Badii immediately distanced from the helpful and lively figures in the Tehran landscape by continually framing him in the driver's window of his car, the passing circus of life rolling away outside his car window.

The pre-credit sequence of the film is almost an inversion of the opening of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire in which the angel Daniel overhears human thoughts and longs to descend to the human level to experience life. In A Taste of Cherry, Badii overhears snatches of human conversation from inside his Range Rover as he scouts the landscape for someone to help kill him. Kiarostami does not get into why Badii wants to die, except for Badii to say at one point that he is exhausted with life.

But Kiarostami is not interested in simple, psychological explanations. Instead, Kiarostami seeks universal truths -- which are a lot harder to swallow and more difficult to sit through. By continually cutting back and forth from Badii to a succession of passengers in his vehicle (driver and passenger are never seen in the same shot), Kiaostami inverts the narrative film device of point-of-view by forcing the audience to identify with this suicidal man. Even more revolutionary for filmgoers is the depiction of the suicidal Badii not as a basket case but as a reasonable man with a specific plan for ending his life.

However strange this film may seem, when all is said and done, Kiarostami presents the moviegoer with a celebration of life in the guise of an enigmatic man seeking his own death.

Aka Ta'm e guilass, Taste of Cherry.



Also tastes like chicken.