Product Details

• Actors: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Safar Ali Moradi, Mir Hossein Noori
• Directors: Abbas Kiarostami
• Writers: Abbas Kiarostami
• Producers: Abbas Kiarostami
• Format: Color, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: Persian
• Subtitles: English
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Homevision
• VHS Release Date: June 16, 2000
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00000IBYU
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #37,350 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #9 in	Video > Art House & International > By Original Language > Persian (Farsi)
  #12 in	Video > Art House & International > By Country > Iran

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for this contemplative film about a Muslim, Mr. Badi (Homayon Ershadi), who drives around the barren hills outside Tehran, flagging down passersby and offering good money for a simple job that he's hesitant to explain. He's planning his suicide and seeks someone to perform something of a symbolic eulogy. Most of his subjects refuse (personal morality aside, suicide is forbidden to Muslims), but he finds an elderly taxidermist (Abdolrahman Bagheri) who agrees only because he needs the money for an ill child. Yet the old man gently pleads with him to choose life, to embrace the joys of earthly existence, to remember the taste of cherries. Though initially greeted with critical acclaim, A Taste of Cherry received poor distribution in the U.S. The meandering, deliberately paced drama is composed of long conversations and long silences, and the camera is locked in the car for entire sequences, staring at the protagonists in still closeups with the dusty landscape rolling past the windows of the Land Rover in the background. Kiarostami's film is not for everyone, but if you can embrace the quiet power and grace of his deceptively simple style, the film becomes a remarkably rich celebration of human dignity and resilience. By the astonishing conclusion we can see past Badi's age-etched face to the soul peering out from behind his sad eyes. --Sean Axmaker

Product Description

WInner of the top prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Taste of Cherry is an existential fable of weight and clarity from director Abbas Kiarostami. An Iranian man, Mr. Badii, is determined to commit suicide at nightfall, but seeks a living assistant to check his hand-dug grave the following morning. If Badii is dead, the person will fill the grave with dirt; if not, he will help Badii out of the hole -in either event receiving a handsome reward for the task. Badii scours the hills outside Tehran in his Range Rover, explaining the proposition to his passengers one by one. The candidates -- among them a soldier, a seminarian and taxidermist -- react differently to Badi's strange, forbidden request. Each lends new perspective on what it is that makes life worth living.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A taste to be savored, February 13, 2000

By	Robert Stribley (NY, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you're going to make a film which largely consists of a man driving his Range Rover along dusty Iranian roads, soliciting various men for their assistance, you'd sure better make an engaging film. For the philosophically inclined, Abbas Kiarostami has done just that.

Though most of the film takes place on a few dirt roads over-looking Tehran, you could still see it as a road movie, albeit a sophisticated, intellectually engaging one.

Homayon Ershadi plays Badii, the driver of the Range Rover, as a strong yet depleted man, a man with resignation etched into his face in every frame. Mr. Badii is trying to find someone to help him with his suicide. The job is simple: come to cover his body if he's successful; rescue him if he is not. He's willing to give a tremendous amount of money for only a little work. Each man he picks up reacts to his offer in a different way--each of them conveys the belief that Badii's taking his own life would be wrong, but each of them gives different a reason for his inability to help. The only man willing to help Badii is another who once attempted suicide. Even he tries to convince him to remain, to remember the taste of cherry.

The end of the movie has been misunderstood by some reviewers; it's not a trick, the movie is not a sham. The ending simply provides a jolting coda, reminding us that no matter how barren life may seem, there is a reality uncolored by emotion and mental disease, and in that reality there are others leading joyful lives.

Not only has Kiarostami given us food for thought, he reveals gritty, dusty Tehran to be a city of haunting golden beauty. Another filmaker would have taken us to Eden to prove his point, but Kiarostami shows us there is beauty wherever you are, even in a land seemingly drained of color and steeped in binding tradition.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Khayyám at 24 FPS, September 5, 2004

By	Nassim Sabba "Nassim" (Brookline, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Taste of Cherry - Criterion Collection (DVD)

Khayyám was a few centuries before Nietzsche and Sartre in his questioning and denial of religion and god. It should also be no surprise that he was the contemporary of Khawrazmi, the Persian mathematician who has given the world the idea of zero, or NOTHING.
The abstraction of nothingness as dust is prevalent in Khayyám's work. So it is in this presentation. The alienation of modern man from nature too ties Kiarostami and Khayyám in an inverse manner, where Khayam saw all nature as nothing, except for the short flash of life, Kiarostami presents nature as a flash in a lifetime, of course along a long and winding road, where a single taste of cherries is equivalent to taking in the whole universe and attaining the freedom to evaluate life on YOUR own terms. If you choose to forgo cherries and mulberries to spare the ones you wish to live better, it is true shining of life.
The "naturalist" who tries to convince our hero, who is as bitter as any "Omar", that the taste of cherries is sufficient to give meaning to everything and make up for all angst, survives by stuffing birds. Are these not the same 900 year old birds who in Khayyám's poetry ask the question of being and nothingness from atop ruins of bygone kings?
There is not enough room here to get into the cinematography and camera work in this movie. Obviously Kiarostami has watched a lot of Kurosawa too. None the less,
the final scene of the movie is simply beyond expectation. In the age of cold "media", the use of hand held video makes reality into a story, no matter how elating or how painful it might have been, it cools it to a story to be reviewed. Kiarostami uses this device to review a whole life before it is extinguished.
There must be an equivalent to "reviewing one's life" in Khayyám's work which I have not discovered, at least not succinctly yet. Kiarostami may know it but doesn't, or can't tell us. But, so it was Khayyám's problem.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars masterpiece of the cinema of lonliness, October 2, 2005

By	amir y. "amir" (tehran,iran) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Taste of Cherry - Criterion Collection (DVD)

"taste of cherry" is kiarostami's most complete work while-surprisingly-simultaneously being his most personal.i regard it as personal for reasons that to ME are obvious:homayoun ershadi(lead actor)looks a bit like kiarostami,he(in character) apparantely is of an intellectual atheism,his situation(driving around in his car for most of the time of the movie)can be depicted as a metaphor of either the director viewing through his camera or the spectator watching the movie and generally he is easy for the modern artist to identify with in terms of extreme lonliness.kiarostami wisely chooses to give no direct reason for his decision to attempt suicide.instead he focuses on his attempt to make human contact just before departure and from this premise forms the powerful drama of the film.kiarostami can be regarded as one of the most important figures of post-modern cinema:in use of new narrative devices,in this case the dialogues resemble comic book characters conversations where lines are written in white clouds above the characters heads,on the other hand the movie is another take by the director on the subject of life as narrative.each passanger has a "story" to tell,and in the end its about which story will us and Badi'ee(Ershadi) swallow.also its compatible with the post-modern notion of the re-invention of the "text" in the readers conception due to its "open" ending,we can't tell whether Badi'ee commit's suicide or not because neither for us and nor for him that is not the point anymore,we have taken part in hearing differrent stories and and experienced different approaches towards existance.kiarostami reminds us that narrating life IS itself LIFE,just like cheherezad keeps on telling stories to remain alive in the thousand and one nights.taste of cherry is the most sympathetic and lyrical attempt of contemporary cinema in illustrating the urban mans loveless-ness.a word about the DVD:though i'm grateful to the creators of Criterion and not only because of this movie,i hope there will be some improvement in the extras of iranian movies in general.the interview with kiarostami is to old for this movie and due to the importance of this film in kiarostami"s canon, a fresh and extensive interview with the man is necessary,plus reviews by kiarostami-liking critics and praises of international fellow directors.