HELL ABOVE US
ON ABBAS KIAROSTAMI’S TASTE OF CHERRY
“Hurting yourself, isn’t that a sin?”
A man is curb crawling, making slow loops around an interchange somewhere in Tehran where men are strewn in huddles, hoping to be picked up for work as a day laborer. Our man doesn’t seem to see in them what he needs, and he moves on. Up into the hills then, through an array of marble slabs arranged like tombstones (perhaps this is what they are), pulling alongside a young man and failing to entice him into the car with promises of money. Next, circling a quarry turned rubbish dump he comes across a man collecting scraps, and his attempts at friendly conversation fail. The man is not interested in whatever our driver needs to pay money for. It all feels a very predatory dance.
Back down again towards town. Curb crawling once more, he spots a young man in fatigues walking along the side of the road. Ultimately convinces him to get in, grab a ride to base - it’s a long walk after all. The cadet is very young, very sweet. He struggles to hear the driver and stutters out nervous answers to his questions. He has an anxious disposition maybe, just a shy lad, but he’s picked up on a strange air of desperation. Metallic taste of shame in the car. The viewer’s discomfort grows in tandem with his, writhing in his seat, doing calculations on what the true price of this ride might be.
“If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't ask what the job is, but rather how good the pay is”
Our driver, Mr Baddii, played with desperate grace by Homayoun Ershadi, persists. At the top of another hill, golden light, up beyond the barracks. Finally our driver reveals what he needs. He needs someone to help him through the aftermath of a suicide attempt, planned for that evening. To bury him or to save him, depending on what has happened, what decision he or his body have made. Our young soldier is spooked out of his wits by this, leaps, and runs, crashing down a dry and dusty hillside to get away from the proposition. So, our driver begins his descent, back down to find an accomplice.
Taste of Cherry is a film of ascent and descent, an endless progression up and down a hillside that stands as a portal on the threshold of death. Of choosing death. Strange to discover that hell could be after all above us, if hell is where suicides go. Perhaps instead of a freefall the road to hell is a laboured ascent, a long slog to an unremarkable patch of dirt. There is an interesting duality too, in the predatory onset of the film’s action, a man looking to do something so taboo that it feels close to another socially designated transgression.
A second failed journey up and down the hillside with sees a seminarian stick to his scripture, uninterested in a theological debate over the harm of living versus dying. Then, somehow, our driver does find an accomplice. Mr Bagheri now sits beside us as we make yet another journey up the hillside. An old man this time, willing but reluctant, with a sick daughter’s care to pay for. Mr Bagheri is not so easily spooked, he has the stomach for whate the younger men balked at, and he is compelled to make the case for living to Mr Badii.
After a visit to the potential gravesite to receive instructions, Mr Bagherii asks to take the long way on the drive back down. He has some things to say. Having once made his own plans for suicide, Mr Bagheri - in a wonderful performance by actor Kargar-e Mozeh - delivers an exhortation to live. His own plans were foiled when, having been forced to climb a mulberry tree to secure his noose, he found that the sweet fruit (and the sharing of it) was reason enough to climb back down.
The monologue that follows this revelation is in some ways full of cliches. Don’t you want to see the sun rise and see it set? Taste the cherries? Drink water from a spring? Experience the seasons? But it is delivered with such plain sentiment, as such irrefutable fact, that it wields a huge emotional heft. It is an ode to the elemental and the fundamental, the fruit of the land and the elements that nourish it. And it is peppered with questions too - not just a testimony to living but a provocation. The assertion that though it may not feel that way there still remains a choice.
“The night of the full moon, don't you want to see it again? You want to close your eyes?”
And so perhaps the whole film is a provocation to live. Not a reason but a question. In Mr Badii’s trawling quest we are shown what we hope to be true, that it is a harder thing to die. There is no easy way to repair what drives a man to suicide, but you can at least attempt to upend things, and see how it shakes out. Mr Badii drops Mr Bagheri off at work, drives home to make his final plans, and almost immediately is compelled to turn around. Tracking him down, Mr Badii asks one final thing of Mr Bagheri for the next morning: ‘“Bring two small stones and throw them at me. I might just be asleep but still alive!” Mr Bagheri promises to bring three.
The film ends with what we might call schrodinger’s grave, our protagonist lashed by a storm as he lies in the dirt, as we wonder if he has taken the full dose or not. He has left the door open, spiritually, with Mr Bagheri; the possibility that he may live is there after all, in the stones to be thrown.
Then, the screen folds. Kiarostami inserts himself and his crew into the film. It is another season, suddenly, and the land has been renewed. How to take this firm reassertion of the fiction of the story. It is an incursion into the landscape of the screen by the hardware of its maker, the physical splicing of film from one moment into another, and it is a provocation to the viewer on a par with the provocation to live. If the screen can fold so easily, bringing its outside into view, then who is to say that our world cannot also. Hell is above us after all.