Criterion Collection: Taste of Cherry [DVD] [1998] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Ershadi is mesmerising as a man intent on finding someone to shovel earth into a shallow pit! I was captivated by this man's journey as he picks up a soldier, talks to a man collecting plastic bags, meets an Afghan security guard and his friend, and, finally a taxidermist who talks about eating mulberries whilst attempting to tie a noose to a tree branch. The cinematography is beautiful, particularly the beam of a car's headlights as it weaves it way around a winding road. There is much that is left unexplained in this film, but, for me, this adds to the solemn pace and sad inevitability of the film.

The 1998 Palmed or winner at Cannes is a philosophical treatise about mortality and a cinematic discussion about the role of politics and religion in everyday life by a very enlightened mind called ABBAS KIAROSTAMI ,a righteously celebrated cinematic magician who weaves wisdom out of vast empty frames of the iranian vistas in the suburban dusty hills of Teheran .
We proceed on a cruise in a Range Rover in the arid sinister suburbs of Teheran with BIDAI [ARSHADI ],He is intent on recruiting an accomplice who can help him commit suicide which he wants to label as an unintentional death to escape his own responsibility in the moral dilemma .

The idea is menacing and ingenious and it forms the crux of his conversations with the three men he picks up as he cruises around his future grave and propositions them with a tempting fiscal offer to be an accomplice .

The Islamic ideology of suicide being totally forbidden is discussed here in context to what rights does a human being possess,if your ego is not satisfied with your existence itself then what justification arises for juxtaposing a wasted negative existence over the rest of humanity .

Abbas has dealt with the crucial universal eternal dilemma and theosophical discussion immaculately as he throws his three protagonists into an abyss filled with dusty roads and earthen mountains being metaphorically shifted by huge man made cranes -the three other characters who constitute the would be accomplices are picked randomly from the fringes of a suffering social milieu where humanity is both absolved of its sins and yet the spirit is redeemed in its glory of painful existence .

The ideology as to whatever the torment and turmoil ,the human existence is not an easy disposition and everyone has their share of the burden to carry so does a man possess the right to ask help in an act of self.

The rest needs to be seen as Abbas has evolved a beautiful conclusion to his most intelligible debate about the human condition .

The movie is not a moral monologue or a parade of individuals to judge humanity but a discussion about human rights and the rights of the divine existence as defined by Islam .

I have never seen such a celestially ethereal celebration of divinity as established by Islam with respect to the rights of an individual and his relationship with faith itself .

Abbas has shot this in an earthy ,diffuse light in an obscure landscape with scant vegetation and a vast construction site where bulldozers shift piles of earth in metaphorical existentialism and also the idea is borne out that everything we have comes from the earth and goes back to IT.

A movie made in Iran. About a man who does not want to live. Different persons in differen ways try to tell him the meaning of life.