Featured Contributor: The Hereafter Taste of Cherries
Filmmaker and essayist Philip Józef Brubaker has some thoughts on the Kiarostami classic.
Bill’s note: The following piece was submitted as is. Enjoy.
by Philip Józef Brubaker
I married you because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. That was what God wanted me to do. At the time I felt differently about God. Who is God? I will try to remember how I felt at that time. In 2015, I thought God was a force; a series of coincidences that spoke directly to me, encouraging me to follow instructions, as if that were the only way. Now, I see God as a force encouraging me to follow my own path. The path of my own making. You were instrumental in helping me find my path. We walked that path together. Who is God, you said, back then. As if you didn’t know.
Is it a city of clouds, with a bearded white man in a flowing robe that sits atop a golden throne behind pearly gates? Is it a towering stairway that stretches high into infinity? Whatever it is, cinema seems to tell us that Heaven is separate from us all, in the clouds. But these are clouds that you can stand on with your own two feet, and you won’t fall through back to Earth.
But what if I told you there was another way to show heaven, that was not telegraphed in such a ham-fisted way? What if Heaven were absurd, a thinly veiled curtain protecting the way sausage is made? The Western clichê that Heaven is a place (as opposed to a state of being) was already parodied by Warner Brothers cartoons more than half a century ago. Haven’t we all seen Bugs Bunny strum a lyre while floating upward, a translucent apparition? And somehow that was funny? What if a master filmmaker could depict heaven as they saw it…or at least, how it seems to an original mind.
Now, I will watch Taste of Cherry (1997) one more time. I love the ending of that film, because I love the distancing effect it has on the viewer; drawing attention to the material of the filmmaking itself. But also, it is East Meets West: the Iranian landscape with soldiers training for a military exercise coupled with New Orleans style jazz music. I wonder how non-filmmakers felt about this ending when they saw it in 1997. It's cryptic, and because I am a filmmaker, I worship it.
Driving around when you're supposed to be at work in the middle of the day when children are playing in the dirt. Day laborers desperate for an occupation. Abbas Kiarostami is no different than the schlockiest workman directors. He knows how to tug at your heartstrings. He knows the technical as well as the philosophical. Kiarostami, like Spielberg, knows children are cute, and men driven mad are compelling. And it’s hard as an American not to think about the San Fernando Valley when looking at the nightscape where Badii has dug his future grave. We’re thrust into this Range Rover that traverses dust-covered hills and switchbacks. What is this film trying to tell us?
At first, it appears to be about driving. The film is so mobile, the sound design seems like an accident, car horns punctuate the dialogue at decisive moments - was it planned that way? The driving scenes are perfectly exposed between the natural light inside the car and the outside world. Mr. Badii, the enigmatic heart of the film moves through space, his body floats and whirrs past a moving canvas of passing trees, buildings.
Movement is the quality that separates cinema from all the other visual arts. In 1997, we were still operating on the persistence of vision. Celluloid magic. Chemical alchemy.
As Kiarostami’s film opens, Mr. Badii picks up a young soldier headed to the barracks. "I had fun when I did my military service. It was the best time of my life.” Badii tells the soldier. Kiarostami mercilessly ramps up the homoerotic misdirection. The scene with the young soldier is tense as the older, more educated man seems to prey on him. The soldier seems simple, trusting. Vulnerable, even. Is he going to be taken advantage of?
Roger Ebert notoriously panned Taste of Cherry in a one-star review for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1998 calling it “excruciatingly boring.” What seems boring is actually textbook Platonic drama. A man wants something. His scene partner wants the opposite. Throw 20 spadefuls of dirt on my head. “Do I have to beg,” Mr Badii asks the soldier. “No,” he says. “You don't throw earth on someone's head.” “I'll give you a spade.” Mr. Badii says.
The soldier runs away. Badii stops to look at a group of soldiers march and chant; it comes after a murmuration of birds flies overhead. There’s no mistaking the contrast between the weathered faces of the men Badii encounters and his own smooth, prince-like features. Badii looks well-off yet he is the one driving around asking people to assist in his suicide. What does he have to be depressed about anyway? Kiarostami won’t tell us.
There is something darkly comic about a man who wants to kill himself being scared to climb a rickety ladder that leads to another man’s front door. When Badii does get out of the car, to coax a man making an omelette to off him, he asks, “You climb this ladder every day?” Does Badii really want to die, or does he just need some help?
The men Badii encounters don't have the mastery of language he has. Badii speaks poetically and with elegance and confidence. He is articulate. He just needs an inarticulate man to sling dirt onto his face. The men he picks up just want to make a living. Badii just wants to be the engineer his own death.
The wealthy Badii does eventually make progress. He finds someone to agree to his plan, an older man… but this man may only be indulging Badii's suicide fantasy.
How fun to drive around while other people have to work. What a privilege it is to make-believe your own death while others are forced to break rocks in order to break bread? Arid, windswept hills of the desert, where Badii has dug his grave glow at the break of day. He drives on a rocky road listening to his passengers pontificate about life. Life passes them by.
If the nature of cinema is movement, a film mostly about sitting in a car is the most cinematic of all, as the image constantly meanders through the frame of Badii’s rolled-down window.
After he finds someone to agree to assist in his suicide, Badii runs to what looks to Western eyes like the pearly gates of heaven. But, inshallah it is just the factory where his angel of death works. Nevertheless, it is one of the few places in the film which Badii runs to. Before long, he will lay in the earth. Who among us has not been like Badii in his grave, looking up at the clouds brushing the moon, while a dog barked in the distance? Even if we were in our warm beds at the time…
Let's pretend we don't know why Kiarostami ended his movie the way he did. Whether or not it was because he didn't know what to do, or he knew exactly what to do. There are explanations out there as to what the Iranian master was up to. If you've gotten this far in the article, its because you want to know what I think, and so I will give it to you.
After Close-Up (1990), all bets were off. Abbas Kiarostami, the poetic realist who won worldwide stardom with Where Is The Friend’s House (1987) is actually irreverent as goatfuck.
Badii lays down in his open grave at night. Thunder crashes. Lightning strikes. The clouds slice through the moon like Buñuel’s razor across a donkey’s eye. Badii’s eyes are wide open. He lays there, sedentary. Waiting to die. Death is a process, my mother says. Not an event. Taking your own life is another matter. Yet, Badii’s decision to die seems premature. He is healthy, his mind sharp. He is downright vital; full of vitality, in fact. He did not relent in his search to find a man to kill him. What drive, what verve. What passion. A life force. In no danger of stopping.
We all want to know what will happen to him. Will he die at the end of this film?
Kiarostami the trickster gives us something unexpected. The setting changes from a nighttime gravesite to hills during the day. And even a casual moviegoer would notice that the film looks different. The material quality becomes pixilated, like a home movie. As a filmmaker, I instantly recognized that it was low-grade video, not celluloid.
Why?
And where was Badii? Why are we looking at a film crew? The charismatic man in. sunglasses must be Kiarostami. The actor playing Badii walks into frame, places a cigarette in his mouth and looks down, perhaps going through the paces to prepare for a scene.
Suddenly, I am aware that we are now behind the scenes for the film I have been watching.
I hear music. And it sounds familiar to my Western ears, like a New Orleans-style blues number. It seems incongruous with the Middle Eastern sensibility. But again, the irreverence shows. We see soldiers reclining on a hill, playing with wildflowers. Their behavior is off-the-cuff; playful. Axis of evil, my ass.
What gall to end a movie like this!
Is it really the end?
You were there all along, you walked with me, not against me. You were in control, and I allowed it. You gave me your life in exchange that I would keep it well. How could I have betrayed you this way. But I can’t live without knowing the taste of cherry.
The title for this Palme D’Or-winning film comes from a line of dialogue a character speaks to encourage Mr. Badii to live. What would he expect of the hereafter? A land in the clouds. A big white man with a beard. A holy escalator straight to God’s lap. We speak only in cliché when we talk about life and death in America. After the movie ends, we watch the behind the scenes. Leave it to Kiarostami to make the end a peek, a semblance; a wart, a call to arms: a daisy in the ear of a soldier.
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