Taste of Cherry and the Long Refusal

What do you actually watch for 99 minutes?

You stay close to Badii and his car for most of the running time. He stops, invites men inside, offers a large sum of money for a job, and drives on while they answer. He has already dug his grave outside the city. He asks each man to come to the chosen spot in the morning, then either to help him out if he has chosen to live or to cover him with earth if he has chosen to die. He does not explain why he wants to die, and you are asked to sit with that missing reason rather than solve it.

The cast around him is small. Abdolrahman Bagheri plays Mr. Bagheri, the taxidermist. Safar Ali Moradi plays the soldier. Mir Hossein Noori plays the seminarian. Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari is credited as Worker. You learn these men through talk in the front seats, not through backstory, and the film keeps returning to road, dust, hills, and the hole in the ground.

Why does Badii keep driving instead of explaining?

Driving gives the film its shape. Each ride is a test of language, and each passenger hears the same request in a slightly different way. You can point your group to that repetition. Ask what changes between rides and what stays fixed. The request stays fixed. The answers shift from fear to religious refusal to practical acceptance. The car keeps moving while Badii listens, insists, and sometimes doubles back.

The style supports that pattern. The film is described as minimalist, shot primarily in long takes at a leisurely pace, with long stretches of ambient sound that the closing sequence shows the crew recording. Badii is rarely shown in the same shot as the person he talks to, an effect tied in part to the shoot itself, during which Kiarostami sat in the passenger seat. For a small hall, that matters. You can plan sound and seating for a quiet screening so every pause and engine noise carries, because the film asks you to listen as much as to look.

Three passengers, three answers that are not the same

The first man is a shy young Kurdish soldier. He refuses and flees the car. The second is an Afghan seminarian who declines because he has religious objections to suicide. Neither man will take the money, and neither will promise to return in the morning. You can use these two short encounters to show how quickly Badii loses control of the exchange. He offers payment, but he cannot buy agreement.

The third man changes the rhythm. Bagheri, an Azeri taxidermist, says he will help because he needs the money for his sick child. He stays longer, argues more directly, and tries to turn Badii back toward life. If you lead discussion, keep these three positions distinct. Flight, refusal based on belief, and acceptance out of need are three different responses to the same grave, and the full cast and credits help you keep the names and roles straight when you assign passages to compare.

How does the taxidermist try to talk him back toward life?

Bagheri tells Badii that he too once wanted to die, in 1960, and that he lived after tasting mulberries that dropped from a tree when his attempt failed. He says he carried the fruit home and that his wife enjoyed it. He then speaks about sunrises, the moon, and the stars, and about simple pleasures that reopened his senses. You hear a simple parable rather than an argument, and several American critics singled out that speech as the lyrical center of the film.

Bagheri promises to throw earth on Badii if he finds him dead in the morning. Badii drives him back to his workplace, then returns with one more demand. In the morning, Bagheri should make sure Badii is truly dead by throwing stones and shaking him awake in case he is asleep. That detail is useful for discussion. Ask your group what it means to ask for certainty inside a plan built on uncertainty, and whether Badii wants help dying or help being found.

What do you hear when music almost disappears?

You hear almost no background score until the closing titles, which use a trumpet piece, Louis Armstrong's 1929 adaptation of St. James Infirmary Blues. The only other song in the story is Khuda Bowad Yaret, meaning "May God be your protector," by Afghan singer Ahmad Zaher, heard on the radio about 38 minutes into the film. In the sequences around and inside the wildlife museum, the background music features the voice of Abdolhossein Mokhtabad. Point this out before you play the film so your audience notices how much work the road noise, voices, and silences have to do.

That sparseness also explains the reception split. On Rotten Tomatoes the approval rating stands at 83 percent based on 40 reviews, with the critics' consensus that notes a simple aesthetic and an ambiguous character study. On Metacritic the score is 80 out of 100 based on 22 critics, listed as generally favorable. Roger Ebert gave the film 1 out of 4 stars, called it excruciatingly boring, objected to knowing so little about Badii, and later placed it among his most hated films. Jonathan Rosenbaum responded with four stars and defended the mystery surrounding Badii and the final break in the image as an invitation rather than a distancing device. Later recognition kept growing, with six critics and two directors including it as one of ten films in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll and Slant Magazine placing it ninth among films of the nineties.

Why does the ending leave Badii in the dark and then show daylight?

At night Badii lies down in his grave while a thunderstorm starts. The image then cuts to a long blackout. Instead of showing what he chooses, the film breaks the fourth wall with camcorder footage of Kiarostami and the crew at work on Taste of Cherry, and Badii's choice stays unknown. You can prepare a spoiler-aware room for that shift. Tell viewers in plain terms that no answer comes, then ask them to watch the change in texture from film to video, from night to day, from a lone body in a hole to workers on a hillside.

For programming, that coda changes the task. The Criterion Collection released the film on DVD on 1 June 1999 and on Blu-ray on 21 July 2020, so you can check your booking against those editions and confirm which closing image your file preserves. A later account notes that the ending was cut for the theatrical run in Italy, which reminds you to verify the version you show. You can also pair the film with another Iranian title in your season, such as the family split shaped by law, and ask how each film uses withheld information without cheating the viewer.

The Wikipedia entry in brief

The Wikipedia page on Taste of Cherry is an English reference entry on the 1997 film. It lists credits, release dates, running time, country, language, and box office, then gives plot, cast, notes on minimalist style, music cues, release history, reception figures, and home media dates. Use it to check spellings, song titles, poll counts, and review scores while you build your handout, then bring three open questions about the grave, the mulberries, and the final video so the room talks about choices rather than answers.