Endless yellow earth, winding roads, and Mr. Badii’s solitary drive. He is searching for someone to bury him, yet he stumbles upon reasons to stay alive. Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry is a film about death that is really about life, a meditation on suicide that becomes an argument for existence.
“Do you want to give up the sun rising in the morning? Do you want to give up the taste of cherries?” This is the question posed by the old taxidermist, the last person Mr. Badii picks up in his car. It is a simple question, almost childishly simple. But it contains the entire philosophy of the film. Life is not about grand meaning or cosmic purpose. It is about small, specific pleasures: the taste of a cherry, the warmth of the sun, the beauty of a sunrise. These things may seem insignificant, but they are what tether us to existence.
Kiarostami’s lens is restrained. There is no hysterical despair here, only a quiet gasping for air amidst the swirling dust. Mr. Badii does not rant or rage against his fate. He simply drives through the hills outside Tehran, picking up strangers, asking them if they will bury him after he takes the pills he has prepared. The film’s structure is repetitive, almost ritualistic. We watch the same journey again and again, with different passengers, each offering a different perspective on life and death.
Death is not an ending, but a window through which we re-examine life. This is what Taste of Cherry does so brilliantly. By focusing on a man who has decided to die, the film forces us to think about what makes life worth living. Each passenger offers Mr. Badii a reason to reconsider: religious faith, family obligation, the simple beauty of the natural world. But the film does not tell us whether these arguments are successful. It leaves Mr. Badii’s fate ambiguous, unresolved.
When the screen plunges into pitch blackness and thunder rolls, I felt as if I were lying in that grave with Badii, smelling the scent of rain hitting the dry soil. This moment is one of the most powerful in all of cinema. We are plunged into darkness, into the grave that Mr. Badii has dug for himself. We hear the sounds of night, of thunder, of rain. And then, after what feels like an eternity, the film cuts to a completely different register: a video camera, color footage, Kiarostami and his crew filming the movie we have just watched. It is a jarring, disorienting shift, but it is also strangely hopeful. It reminds us that this is a film, a constructed artifact, not reality. It suggests that Mr. Badii’s story is not the only story, that there are other possibilities, other ways of seeing.
Perhaps we are all waiting for that one cherry—small, bittersweet, yet enough to tether a weary soul to this world. Life has no inherent meaning; it is these specific tastes that give it one. This is the wisdom of Taste of Cherry, and it is a wisdom I return to often. When I am depressed, when I am overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of existence, I think about the taste of cherries. I think about the small, specific pleasures that make life bearable: a good cup of coffee, a conversation with a friend, the way light falls through a window in the afternoon.
Kiarostami does not offer easy comfort or false hope. He does not suggest that life is always worth living or that suicide is never the answer. Instead, he presents us with a question: What are the small things that tether you to existence? What are your cherries? And he trusts us to find our own answers, to decide for ourselves whether those small pleasures are enough to justify the pain and difficulty of being alive. For me, they are. For me, the taste of cherries is enough.
