Abbas Kiarostami's haunting and mysterious Taste of Cherry won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997; I first watched it a couple of years after that. A drawn, careworn but handsome and elegant Iranian man called Badii, played by the Iranian actor Homayoun Ershadi, drives around a stark Beckettian landscape in his Range Rover. He is looking for someone to help him take his own life. Badii never behaves in an obviously wretched or despairing manner; there are no cries or tears, and he never reveals the reason for what he intends to do.
A good deal has happened to the context in which this film must be viewed in 2012, certainly in the UK. The debate over assisted suicide, and suicide generally, has been altered by the opening of the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland in 1998, and the subject has over the past 14 years become increasingly thinkable, less and less taboo. Press debate periodically attaches to legal cases in the UK, though there was almost no outcry in 2009 when the conductor Sir Edward Downes and his wife Lady Joan Downes, at the ages of 85 and 74 respectively, ended their lives together at the Swiss unit. And after 11 September 2001, the concept of jihadi terrorism triggered a new debate about suicide. It is absolutely forbidden by Islamic law – as one character robustly reminds Badii – but zealots feel that suicide bombings are not "suicide" in this sense at all. They had in fact been common currency from the early 1980s in the Lebanese civil war.
Maybe it would be too much of a stretch to imply some resonance in Taste of Cherry, some kind of inner personal jihad – taking arms against a sea of troubles. But certainly Badii insists that there is something justifiable and even noble in what he wants to do.
The opening sequence is hypnotic, and unforgettably disturbing. We see Badii driving around Tehran's itinerant labour markets, looking for someone, sizing up the men he sees on street corners. They crowd round his car, puzzled, peering directly into the camera, asking if he wants men. "You want workers? Take one! Take two!" But something about these men displeases Badii and he drives on, up into the hills, where his ears prick up at the sound of a young man arguing on a payphone with his girlfriend about money. Badii starts to speak to this man, making small talk, with the slightly curt, coercive tone of a police officer.
What on earth does Badii want? Trade? Sex? He has the hunted look of someone looking for a prostitute, and this young man clearly suspects as much, telling him to be on his way or he will "smash his face in". Bizarrely, ironically, this same young man is to make a tiny cameo appearance in Badii's life at the very end of the film, a brilliantly understated moment.
Later, Badii will pick up a young soldier, doing his national service; he drives him to the shallow grave he has dug in a remote hillside, and reveals to this stunned squaddie the awful proposition. The plan is that later that night Badii will take a fatal dose of pills and lie in the grave waiting for death. The soldier merely has to come back at dawn, check that he's dead, and then bury him: just 20 shovelfuls of earth will do it. The man would then find a handsome cash payment waiting for him in the car.
The soldier is horrified – perhaps at the possibility of dirty dealing. After all: can he be sure that the body will in fact be Badii's? Is he being stitched up? Won't the police find this abandoned car near an obviously freshly dug grave and possibly connect the soldier to this event, and not believe the "suicide" story?
Well, the soldier is horrified mostly at being a party to suicide – and runs away. Badii tries vaguely to interest a seminarian and a security guard in his plan. That too goes nowhere. And then, in a enigmatic "flash-forward" or narrative jump-cut, we find that Badii is talking to a grizzled old man, employed to demonstrate dissections and taxidermy to college students. This man was suicidal in his own youth; he tries to talk Badii out of it. But finally, with a heavy heart, agrees to help.
Part of the importance of Taste of Cherry is that Badii's quest has somehow led him to the historical pressure points of the Middle East. One possible candidate is from Kurdistan, and Badii instantly talks to him about what he has suffered at the hands of Saddam's Iraq, less than 10 years before. The security guard is Afghani, and Badii talks to him of what his people have suffered in the previous decade. Somehow only the dispossessed, the traumatised and the excluded have the right stuff to help him. Badii senses that being a strong young labourer or soldier, or someone in need of cash, isn't enough. You have to have a kind of sadness in your bones.
There are plenty of miserablist films about suicide. Why does this one have such power? It is partly because Badii never invites sympathy or compassion in any conventional way: watching Taste of Cherry I feel gripped; I feel scared, but I don't feel sad – or not exactly. And it is partly because of the implications of what he has in mind. We think of suicidal people as desperate, so desperate, that they don't care who finds their body. But Badii does not want to be discovered; he wants his body never to be found; he wants his suicide to be a secret. He wants utter self-annihilation, and the pathos and wretchedness of his self-directed conspiracy are gripping.
Famously, the old man tries to talk him out of it with gentle wisdom, with common sense, with a passionate advocacy of the pleasures of life – the taste of a cherry. He even tells him a joke. A man goes to the doctor, frantic because every inch of his body is in pain: "I touch my head and it hurts! I touch my chest and it hurts! I touch my leg and it hurts!" "Your body is fine," says the doctor, "but your finger is broken!" Could it be that Badii's perception is wrong?
Maybe. Yet interestingly, what the man uses to persuade Badii is the glory of the natural world, which will always rise, unchallenged, above his despair. A sunset, a sunrise, the taste of fruit. Nothing to do with the pleasures of poetry, or philosophy or music – nothing to do with human society. Just nature: just that taste. Perhaps, in extremis, this is the only thing that will look plausible to the despairing.
I will never know what to think about the final scene of Taste of Cherry. Anticlimactic? Evasive? Yes, perhaps. But also incomparably strange, self-aware, and somehow very moving.
The film has a remarkable austerity and starkness; watching it is like being waylaid by the Ancient Mariner, who grips you with a strange and terrible message in his tale. It is Kiarostami's greatest film.
