Review of Taste of Cherry / …طعم گیلاس, directed by Abbas Kiarostami

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

There was a period throughout 2025 where I was left unemployed, and I was so incredibly grateful to be in the financial situation where if I wanted to take a break and step away from the grind, I could. I didn’t intend for it to be as long as it was, as I was applying to over 300 jobs and couldn’t find a position. Not a great time to job hunt during one of one of the worst job markets in decades.

I am happy to report I did find a job, but when I was unemployed I was watching a lot of movies and reading books in order to fill the time when I wasn’t spending it stalking LinkedIn and Indeed. It took 300 job applications, but I did find a gig fifteen minutes down from where I live, so I’m happy with my commute and the gig I did end up finding.

But before then, I was writing a lot of blog posts about the movies and shows I was watching, and this post is from one of them. This is actually going to be one of the last blog posts before I start my job, so my twice-a-day schedule is probably going to be cut back a bit.

Anyways: despite being very into film, having worked professionally as a film critic, and even being Iranian American myself, I have watched an embarrassing little amount of Abbas Kiarostami’s work. I know a lot about Kiarostami and his life, but I’ve only watched a handful of his movies.

It’s thanks to my local library system that I get Kanopy for free, and they have his movies on there usually. That’s how I ended up watching Taste of Cherry on a lonely Tuesday morning. I’m going to miss waking up and watching a movie while I eat breakfast, but it’s time to lock down my health insurance.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to keep rambling forever.

A man looking to commit suicide looks for the perfect person to help him do so.

The main character of Taste of Cherry, who we get to spend a lot of time with during this movie, is Badii. He’s middle-aged and lives in Tehran, and, throughout the course of the movie, he’s on a mission to die. He goes through the streets of Tehran in hopes that he will find someone who will help him with the act. But, at first, we don’t know that—he only tells them he has a job for them and will pay a lot.

Badii has already dug his own grave, and when he finds people willing to listen to him, he tells them to go to the spot he has chosen to die in the next morning. Then, they will bury him if he is dead, or help him out of the grave if he has cold feet and decides that he wants to live after all. Suicide is a very taboo subject in Iran and, like many other cultures, is frowned upon, which makes this movie even more interesting to watch.

The first person to take up his offer though is a Kurdish boy. He’s an adult, but very much a boy, as we see from their interactions, and his occupation is to be a soldier. When the Kurdish boy flees after discovering what exactly the job is, Badii goes back to find someone else.

The second person remains unnamed, but he is Afghan and studying religion devoutly. This is a bit of a doomed cause from the start because of his religious beliefs, as when he finds out what exactly Badii wants him to do, he backs out and says he cannot go through with this because of his religion.

The third and final person makes the biggest impact on this story. It’s a man named Bagheri, who is Azeri and works as a taxidermist. He’s willing to do the job because his son is ill and he needs the money for his treatment, even though he wants to tell Badii not to commit suicide and to continue living.

He shares a story where, many years prior, he wanted to die too. He tried to kill himself and failed, but when he tasted the mulberries that dropped from a tree, he found a new reason to live. He brought them home to his wife and continued onwards, finding new beauty in life and reasons to keep going even when it seemed difficult.

Despite this, Bagheri tells Badii that he will put dirt on his body if he’s dead the next morning. Badii leaves Bagheri at his work, then he goes back to inform Bagheri before he leaves to check whether he is dead or not. He goes to the grave and lies down as a thunderstorm begins.

Badii’s story ends there, as the movie finishes with Kiarostami and the crew filming the movie. We do not know whether Badii went through with ending his life or not—it’s an open ending.

Overall Thoughts

Kiarostami was a master of cinema, and it was a tragic day when he passed away for the film world. Taste of Cherry is an indicator of the realism of Iranian cinema during the late 1990s, and it’s a blueprint for what it would become to this day. It’s more philosophical in nature, showing how Kiarostami was thinking about literature and poetry within his cinematic work.

I think Iranian culture and language is seeped in poetry and literature, but movies like these hit different. Sometimes movies aren’t meant to be written solely for the screen; they’re an art form as well. I find scripts to often be some of the weaker parts of movies, but this screenplay/script is solid all the way through.

I can see how it might frustrate audiences who aren’t used to this kind of filmmaking or storytelling. They want a clean cut story, something they can latch on to and say that it definitively means or ends this way. I think the beauty in movies like these is how we can see humanity in its rawest forms, whether it’s a man who wants to die or a man who found a reason to keep going.

All of this is to say: watch this one if you’re in a contemplative mood, or want to watch a modern classic. This is such a good movie in so many different ways, not just the script and the poetry of Kiarostami’s style.

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