Taste of Cherry: Each Season Brings a Fruit By deadandconfused

The best films about complex social issues are those that realize that there is no universal solution to the problems they present. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing doesn’t attempt to educate viewers on how to “end racism.” It’s simply an order to “Wake up!”, as radio DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy implores his audience in the film’s opening scene.

Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry tackles an equally controversial topic. Over the course of a day, we watch a wealthy man named Mr. Badii drive the streets of Tehran. He’s dug his own grave, and he’s looking for someone to come the next morning and bury his body. After several rejections, he encounters Mr. Bagheri, who agrees to the job in order to pay for his anemic child’s medical treatment. But Bagheri is also convinced that he can change his companion’s mind and relates a story of how a failed suicide attempt led him to discover the beauty in the world through the taste of a mulberry. His speech is long and impressive, but as the car ride comes to a close, Badii appears unmoved.

Taste of Cherry understands that no persuasive anecdote will be good enough for everyone. It’s a character study rooted in realism, down to Kiarostami’s choice to cast unknown actors in the main roles, and for Badii to make a sudden reversal would feel shallow and go against the few things we know about him. Whether a singular audience member finds Bagheri’s monologue convincing or not, they can understand that it’s simply one man desperately trying to save another. The only thing a single person can do is to show their reason for living and hope that something that they said clicks.

“If you look at the four seasons, each season brings fruit. In summer, there’s fruit, in autumn too, winter brings different fruit and spring too. No mother can fill her fridge with such a variety of fruit for her children.”

As spoken by Bagheri, this quote is perhaps most emblematic of Taste of Cherry’s stance on life. There is no one reason to live that will make everyone happy, but there are so many reasons to live, so many fruits — so many tastes of cherry, that it’s worth it to keep fighting to find your own.

Bagheri is at the Natural History Museum, where he works as a taxidermist. Badii is alone in the car. He watches Bagheri walk through the gates and then starts to drive away, but something changes his mind. He turns around and comes back. For a minute, he stands waiting outside the Taxidermy building, where Bagheri is eagerly teaching a group of young students. He meets with Bagheri and tells him “When you come in the morning, bring two small stones and throw them at me. I might just be asleep but still alive!”. Badii asking this proves that he still hasn’t truly made his decision, and it serves as a small glimmer of hope in the leadup to the film’s divisive ending.

Taste of Cherry (1997)

Badii lies in his grave. He hears the sounds of a thunderstorm and watches clouds pass by against the light of the moon. Suddenly, the image pivots from 35 mm to video and we see the hills where Kiarostami filmed Taste of Cherry as chanting soldiers march by. Various documentary-style shots follow, including a particularly enamoring moment where Homayoun Ershadi, the actor who plays Badii, hands Kiarostami a cigarette. For many, this anticlimactic sequence is what makes or breaks the film, with critic Roger Ebert calling it “a tiresome distancing strategy to remind us we are seeing a movie.” But critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, in an essay titled “Fill in the Blanks”, had a different way of looking at it, praising its “spirit of collective euphoria” and “[representation] of life in all its rich complexity” as central to the film’s thematic core.

What’s most important about that final scene is that it’s not a diversion, but rather a continuation of the story that fits with everything we’ve already seen. What Kiarostami is showing us is his own reason to live: to tell stories, to work with these amazing people, and, hopefully, to create something that can be someone else’s “taste of cherry”. Like with Badii and Bagheri, it’s up to each audience member to decide if he succeeded in convincing them. But regardless, the point is clear: it may not be cherries or filmmaking, but finding the fruit that convinces you to stay on Earth just a little longer is possible, no matter how hard it seems.