Returning to · film essay
Taste of Cherry.
Abbas Kiarostami, 1997. On driving, on landscapes that refuse to explain themselves, and on stillness we mistake for something being wrong.
I watched Taste of Cherry for the first time in a university seminar and could not sit still. I have watched it four times since, and the film has not changed. Only my relationship to my own restlessness has.
Driving.
On the way the film is almost entirely a series of car conversations — the driver at the wheel, someone new in the passenger seat, the landscape doing most of the thinking.
Landscape.
On the outskirts of Tehran doing the work most films assign to music. On the way a hillside can be a moral argument, if the camera is patient enough to let it become one.
“Kiarostami trusts the audience with time. Almost no one else does.”
Waiting.
On the way the film asks us to sit inside a decision without rushing it to conclusion. The discomfort is the point. Almost every modern narrative product is optimised to remove this discomfort. The film is quietly refusing.
Silence.
On the way the is not the same silence in every scene. It changes shape depending on who is in the passenger seat. This is one of the few films that makes silence auditioning.
Trusting the audience.
I don’t want to explain the ending. I don’t want to explain the plot, either. What I want to say is only this: the film left me, at twenty, restless and slightly angry, and left me, this , quiet and slightly grateful. The film did not change. Something else did.
“Stillness only feels uncomfortable in the years we most need it.”
The reason I keep returning to , I think, is not that his films are beautiful — though they are — but that they model an editorial patience that has become almost unrepeatable elsewhere. Nothing is happening, everywhere. I keep going back to see what that looks like on purpose.
Elsewhere in this issue
The Long Afternoon