No matter what anyone’s stance on the matter is, the living will never truly comprehend the extent of suffering the person has gone through to reach that point. Unlike the two preceding films, which movingly convey an instinctual thirst for survival, Taste of Cherry gives us “the preciousness of life” via what might be called a rhetorical inversion. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. Yet Taste of Cherry, the first Iranian film to capture the Palme d’Or at Cannes, will leave no sympathetic viewer becalmed in mere cinephilic admiration. What elevates this film to a whole new level of greatness, however, is when Kiarostami gently steers the wheel and the film becomes less about death and more about the simple pleasure of life itself. It is a small independent film with a relatively straightforward plot, but the ideas it encompasses are as complex and big as life and death. Also your camera just recognizes faces using spatial filtering, feature analysis requires intensity transform. With his deeply political but unclassifiable debut feature, Med Hondo set out to establish a transformational presence for global African cinema and to accelerate the emergence of a new Africa. A warning: The pace is very slow in Taste of Cherry, with long takes and leisurely, repetitious shots of Mr. Badii's car twisting through a hilly countryside. Get info about new releases, essays and interviews on the Current, Top 10 lists, and sales. (1987) concerns a journey of friendship made by a little boy; And Life Goes On (aka Life and Nothing More, 1992) fictionalizes a journey that Kiarostami himself made to discover if the child actors of the previous film were killed in a devastating 1990 earthquake; and Through the Olive Trees (1994), in fictionalizing the filming of And Life Goes On, ponders the difficulties faced by people who survived that quake. Most of the film is given to conversations he has with three men he thus importunes: a young, Kurdish soldier who is spooked by the creepy request; a middle-aged, Afghani seminarian who’s unable to dissuade Badii with religious sympathy; and an avuncular Turk who works as a taxidermist at a natural history museum and who urges the glories of nature—the taste of cherries, say—as the prime reason not to kill oneself. In its penultimate scene, when the figure we’ve identified all along is lying completely still, apparently heading into a … Subverting the archetypes and redemptive tropes of the western, Henry King’s melancholy tale of violence peers into the soul of a legendary gunslinger. *Shared with Shohei Imamura's The Eel. The most celebrated of I…, The vast majority of Cannes top-prize recipients have been either European or American, which makes it all the more worthwhile to note those winners that come from historically underrepresented nations. Like many of his films, most of it takes place in a car on the road. Why does the film not tell us why Badii wants to kill himself (perhaps because what it really concerns is why he, or anyone, would want to live)? The most celebrated of Iran’s great directors, Kiarostami built his international reputation with a trio of features made near Koker, a village in northwestern Iran: Where Is the Friend’s Home? Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Change ). The world has always been fixated that suicide is wrong, and indeed it may be, but what’s even worse is the suffering one … Why does it oddly pose suicide as involving more than one person (which is actually true of life)? Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. But it may not be to everyone’s taste. The late Iranian master takes the spotlight in a magisterial retrospective—the most comprehensive survey of his career ever mounted—opening today at New York’s IFC Center. He has suggested it might be more appropriate to consider as a trilogy the latter two titles plus Taste of Cherry (1997), since these, he says, are connected by a theme: the preciousness of life.One and three. Likewise, in his cinema: no films, only relations between films—and within them. Operating at once as a closely observed, realistic story and a fable populated by archetypal figures, Taste of Cherry challenges the viewer to consider what often goes unexamined in everyday life. Likewise, in his cinema: no films, only relations between films—and within them. In Abbas Kiarostami’s universe, it might be said, there are no things, only relations between things. Learn how your comment data is processed. ( Log Out / (He doesn’t want the accomplice to kill him, merely to return to the site the next day and rescue him if his own efforts haven’t succeeded, bury him if they have.) At the 1997 ceremony, Iran’s flourishing film…, Over on the Criterion Channel, we’ve premiered our latest installment of Observations on Film Art, an original program that examines elements of cinematic style and how great filmmakers utilize them in their work. The Blu-ray Taste of Cherry is packaged with a fold-out featuring an essay by A.S. Hamrah. 3. Taste of Cherry (1998) Roger Ebert. Few horror films are as masterfully executed as John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. Taste of Cherry (Ta'am-e-Gīlās, 1997), a film produced, directed, written, and edited by Abbas Kiarostami, won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and has been hailed as a masterpiece by major critics and media outlets. It becomes a metaphor for the odyssey that the main character goes through. Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. Craig D. Lindsey | 2020-10-05 An interview with Matt Zoller Seitz, Godfrey Cheshire, and … lol. He is a poet, humanitarian, and a master when it comes to blurring the line between art and reality. Canadian actor and filmmaker Connor Jessup’s third short film, Lira’s Forest, is an official selection at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. Taste 1/5 I could taste just a hint of a sweet fruity/cherry flavor on the inhale, but when exhaling, there is just this overpowering chemical taste, like how one would imagine a cleaning product to taste. Operating at once as a closely observed, realistic story and a fable populated by archetypal figures, Taste of Cherry challenges the viewer to consider what often goes unexamined in everyday life. In its penultimate scene, when the figure we’ve identified all along is lying completely still, apparently heading into a darkness both literal and figurative, we’re left utterly alone with ourselves, with our own deepest feelings about the profoundly simple thing that, above all, this film wants us to sense, to savor, to taste: life.And nothing more. Extended conversations with three passengers (a soldier, a seminarian, and a taxidermist) elicit different views on mortality and individual choice. An Iranian man drives his truck in search of someone who will quietly bury him under a cherry tree after he commits suicide. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. And between them and us.Three and one. Suicide is always a legitimate option in life, and many have chosen to take that path. “Taste of Cherry” doesn’t argue for or against the concept of suicide, but it does ask for a compassionate view on the desire to do so. It’s a taste that really lingers, too. Abbas Kiarostami fascinates me. And between them and us.Three and one. Yet Taste of Cherry, the first Iranian film to capture the Palme d’Or at Cannes, will leave no sympathetic viewer becalmed in mere cinephilic admiration. Mr. Badii drives around in his dusty Range Rover searching for random strangers. The first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or, Abbas Kiarostami’s tale of one man’s despair leaves the question of whether life is worth living unanswered. That, during filming, Kiarostami himself occupied the off-camera seat in every conversation we see, suggests the filmmaker revisiting his own struggles with inner darkness. The world has always been fixated that suicide is wrong, and indeed it may be, but what’s even worse is the suffering one has to endure to even contemplate the thought. In his tension-filled, black-comic Oscar winner, Bong Joon Ho masterfully mixes tones and subverts genres in order to shine a harsh light on the mechanisms that maintain class inequality. He informs them that he has decided to commit suicide. In addition it has drawn fulsome praise from iconic film auteurs, Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Luc Godard. Hosted by film-studies scholar Kri…, The first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or, this austere, emotionally complex drama by the great, New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack, New interview with film scholar Hamid Naficy, Interview from 1997 with Abbas Kiarostami, conducted by film scholar Jamsheed Akrami, Program from 2017 on Kiarostami’s use of landscape featuring film scholar Kristin Thompson. ( Log Out / Produced, Written, Directed and Edited by. Or, perhaps this is another Kiarostamian film-about-film, with Badii standing for a fading form of auteur cinema whose final act is its own erasure.The interpretations cut in so many directions because the elements are so simple, yet their arrangement is so intricately, seductively suggestive. In the many episodes, encounters and conversations he has with these strangers, he never reveals the reason he wants to kill himself. Critics have dubbed these films the “Koker Trilogy.” Kiarostami resists the designation, noting the films are connected only by the “accident” of place. There is meaning to be mined from Taste of Cherry and hopefully it will linger with you long after your viewing is done. During a pivotal time for Black cinema, John Berry’s beautifully lived-in drama offered a portrait of an African American family that stood in opposition to a long history of harmful stereotypes. ( Log Out / Blog Posts. The taste of this pen is just not something that grew on me, at all.