Name: Taste of Cherry
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Genre: Drama
Released: 1997
Duration: 99 min
Rating: 7.7

Taste of Cherry (1997) · Cinespective

Meaning, unpacked

Central idea

The film can be read as an inquiry into whether a life can be justified from outside, and into what, if anything, one person owes another, told with deliberate restraint.

What it means, and why it matteredA man drives a Range Rover through the dusty hills at the edge of Tehran, looking for someone to help with a request tied to his wish to die. That is all the plot you need. The film is really about the question underneath it: can a life be justified from the outside, and what does one person owe another?

What it means

A man drives a Range Rover through the dusty hills at the edge of Tehran, looking for someone to help with a request tied to his wish to die. That is all the plot you need. The film is really about the question underneath it: can a life be justified from the outside, and what does one person owe another?

You never learn why Mr. Badii is in despair, and that is the point. Each passenger answers as who they are, shaped by religion, class and duty. The seminarian offers doctrine against private suffering, which turns the film into an ethical debate. The old taxidermist tells of his own despair, and of the cherries. He offers no solution, only taste, light and the morning, a plain human reason to keep going. That is the idea behind the title. Nobody in the car can answer for Badii, but each, by listening or refusing, shows what it means to be answerable to a stranger.

Why it mattered

Kiarostami built the film from almost nothing: a car, a landscape, and the same request returning again and again. The sameness is deliberate, making small differences between the responses stand out. Long, often still takes from inside or beside the car turn it into both a confessional and a cage. There is no score, only wind, dust and construction noise.

He cast people with little acting experience and directed with minimal rehearsal, so the talk feels hesitant and unforced. Homayoun Ershadi, who plays Badii, was not primarily an actor, and his reserved presence suits a man whose reasons stay hidden. Kiarostami often sat in the car or beside it, shaping conversations on the spot, a method that fed into his later film Ten. Suicide was a delicate subject in Iran, and the film's silence on Badii's reasons helped it exist within the rules while suiting Kiarostami's taste for ambiguity.

After watching