The Cinematheque

New Restoration

Kiarostami’s exquisite meditation on mortality was co-winner (with Imamura’s The Eel) of the 1997 Palme d’Or at Cannes. Employing minimalist means to profoundly moving ends, it follows a middle-aged, middle-class man, quietly resolved to some desperate purpose, as he criss-crosses the rural outskirts of Tehran in his expensive SUV. He gives lifts to a series of strangers — a Kurdish soldier, an Afghani seminarian, a Turkish taxidermist — and then offers each a large sum of money if they will assist him in a terrible task. Homayoun Ershadi has the unsettling lead role. Kiarostami’s celebrated poetic humanism is everywhere in evidence; the remarkable hall-of-mirrors formalism, the blurring of fiction and documentary, of his previous features is here held in check until the film’s astonishing, enigmatic finale. Taste of Cherry is an unforgettable work.