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<aside> <img src="/icons/movie_gray.svg" alt="/icons/movie_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Favorite Quote Dialogue or phrases worth remembering.
Mr. Badii: **I don’t know this road.
The Taxidermist: I do, it’s longer, but better and more beautiful.
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<aside> <img src="/icons/potted-plant_green.svg" alt="/icons/potted-plant_green.svg" width="40px" />
We are all just stories, in the end. Two ships passing in the night. Explaining The Change In My Digital Garden
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<aside> <img src="/icons/movie_gray.svg" alt="/icons/movie_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Plot summary
Taste of Cherry follows Mr. Badii, a man driving through the barren outskirts of Tehran in search of someone willing to perform a difficult task: after he takes his own life, the person must come to the place where he has buried himself and either help him or confirm that he is dead. As he drives, Badii encounters several men from very different backgrounds—most refuse to help him, except one man, an elderly taxidermist, who agrees to assist him.
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<aside> <img src="/icons/movie_gray.svg" alt="/icons/movie_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Personal review/thoughts What were your overall impressions of the movie? Did it meet your expectations?
I went into this film thinking it would relate to the idea of two ships passing in the night – and it did end up meeting my expectations, though it took some time to get there. It felt mercilessly boring and awkward until two-thirds of the way in when an old taxidermist appears on the screen. I am so glad I pushed through and continued on, because I really wanted to turn it off. But like the few Kiarostami films I have seen—Close Up and Certified Copy—it was quietly and surprisingly destabilizing, making ordinary reality feel mysterious and deeply emotional in the most unassuming way. They often involve deliberately leaving things ambiguous or unexplained, which is actually more realistic, if you think about it. There is so much we don’t see or know, but the brain always wants the blanks to be filled in. Well, this film doesn’t give us the comfort of certainty.
What I appreciate most is that the film never reveals the reason for Mr. Badii's desire to die. Because we don't know what brought him there, the film doesn't invite us to judge his decision morally or try to determine whether his reasons are sufficient or worthy of killing himself. We're simply allowed to encounter him as he is, where he is.
This makes the taxidermist's encounter especially moving to me. Their meeting is so brief and understated, yet it seems to subtly alter Badii's perception. The man's story about his own experience, the mulberries, and the simple pleasures of being alive don't suddenly resolve anything, but they introduce a small crack in Badii's certainty about suicide. The man doesn't save him. But he puts the thought into Mr. Badii’s mind that maybe he can find the will to continue living, somehow. It's a beautiful example of how a fleeting encounter with another person can quietly change something inside us, even though we may not understand the extent of the impact it has at the time.
So much of life is being surrounded by people who don’t understand you or what you’re going through, and then, unexpectedly, a stranger can relate to you and “see” you, out of context, without knowing anything about you. That small point of connection can give you hope, make you feel understood, and remind you that you’re alive. That’s what I took away from this.
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<aside> <img src="/icons/movie_gray.svg" alt="/icons/movie_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Favorite elements Highlight anything that stood out as particularly memorable or well-executed?
The first half of the film, the endless driving through the same desolate dirt roads, winding around and around, was intentionally boring and uncomfortable for me, but I think that was the point. The landscape feels like a visual representation of Badii’s mind stuck in a loop, going nowhere, circling the same thought over and over again. Then the taxidermist enters and breaks that visual pattern. When Badii drops him off at work, we finally get a completely different perspective: a beautiful sunset viewed from up high above the city, symbolizing Mr. Badii potentially gaining a higher perspective.
The filmmaking itself seems to shift once Mr. Badii meets the old man. There’s a strange, disorienting cut when the taxidermist first gets into the car that I noticed but didn't understand at the time. Looking back, I think it signals a change in Badii’s perception. The world of the film begins to open up once someone finally relates to him.
I liked that the people Badii encounters seem to form a progression. At first, he is repeatedly rejected, but with each encounter, the person becomes a little warmer, more open, and more willing to engage with him.
There’s also a progression through age and experience. He begins briefly greeting children, then encounters the man collecting plastic, who seems almost childlike in his intellectual capacity, then the 18 year-old soldier, the security guard, the seminary student, and finally the elderly taxidermist. It's almost as though Badii is moving through different stages of human experience, gradually arriving at someone who has lived long enough to have encountered suffering, despair, yet discovered the reasons to keep on living.
Like most people have said, the ending of the film is jarring and questionably effective, but I think I understand what Kiarostami may have been doing with it. By suddenly breaking the fourth wall and revealing the filmmaking itself, he reminds us: this is a film. This is a story. We have been watching a constructed reality. And I think this connects to Mr. Badii’s own story. He has become so identified with the stories he’s telling himself, the stories that make him want to die, that he doesn’t realize that life, in essence, is just a story that can change.
This is all hinted at through the taxidermist’s “joke:”
**A turk goes to see a doctor. He tells him, “when I touch my body with my finger, it hurts. When I touch my head, it hurts. My leg — it hurts. My belly, my hand — it hurts.”
The doctor examines him and tells him, “your body’s fine, but your finger’s broken.”**
Then the old man tells Mr. Badii one of the most quotable quotes: “My dear man, your mind is ill, but there’s nothing wrong with you. Change your outlook.” He tells him, “the world isn’t the way you see it. You have to change your outlook and change the world.”
The old man himself had once left home with the intention to commit suicide, but an experience with a mulberry changed him. An ordinary, unimportant mulberry came to inspire a newfound appreciation for life.
I think the ending is an invitation to step outside of the story for a moment. To see the constructed nature of what we've been taking so seriously. And perhaps, if we can do that with our own lives, we can realize that we aren't necessarily required to remain inside the story we've been telling ourselves. We can get up, walk away from it, and begin to see life differently. The ending is jarring and random, just as jarring and random that the taste of a fruit could snap you out of your stupor and make you realize that you’re just telling yourself a silly story about your life. And that you can change that narrative.
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