طعم گيلاس

I just saw a Persian movie, Abbas Kiarostami's award winning Taste of Cherry (1997) (Ta'm-e gīlās or طعم گيلاس) today.

The first time I heard of him was recently, some time last year. I was at a huge bookfair at Pragati Maidan (one of the largest exhibition grounds) in New Delhi; I can't remember what section I was in, but there were a lot of books there of the type you would find in the Humanities sections in University libraries; non-fiction, stuff on identity and politics, etc. I don't know now what book it was that I opened, but I remember opening a page at random, and it was one of those glossy section-separator pages done in grey. It said

Inside the shrine
I thought a thousand thoughts
And when I left
it had snowed

I took it down immediately, somehow I knew I had to run into this poet again. His name was Abbas Kiarostami, and I had no idea he was also a photographer and filmmaker.

Later I Googled him, and found an old news clip from 2005; a series of his photographs, entitled Trees in Snow was on display April to June at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Zelda Cheatle Gallery. (I think they were also shown at Berkeley in 2007). This little verse introduced the exhibit.

You can't figure out in the first maybe twenty minutes why Mr. Badii, a middle-aged Iranian (played by Homayoun Ershadi) is driving around the bleak desert outskirts of Tehran in his Range Rover. As it turns out, he is looking for help. He has decided to kill himself that night, and wants someone to come at daybreak the next day to the grave he has already dug, and after checking that he is dead, cover him with earth. After which there will be cash waiting in the car as reward. The film traces his journey in search of someone to help him in what no man seems to be willing to do.

This is not really a spoiler, but if you are afraid of it being, please skip the rest!

Mr. Bagheri says,

I had gone to kill myself
and came back
with mulberries

Was this supposed to be poetry? Who knows. But I wish I could understand Persian; there is a certain cadence to the screenplay that is bound to be missed in subtitle.

As far as the visual dimension of the film goes, I don't know what to say; it's not a stylised movie, it's pretty functional. There are none of the scenic scenes, as it were, that I am so fond of - those that want to make you take a still photograph of the milieu. It's very rough around the edges; but still there are scenes like the one where he goes to the Museum to see Mr. Bagheri, the taxidermist who agrees to carry out his plan. He's sitting outside the lab, framed in the window and against the backdrop of a fall into a valley that is the undulating city.

In the quarry where he sits down, dust swarms around him till he is lost inside the whirling opaque cloud. When he is lying in the grave, he looks up and sees the moon, there are the secret nighttime sounds of the desert, and the thunderous gusts sweep dirt into his face under the grey.

Overall, I did not care much for the very very slow pace of the first half or so. And as for Mr. Bagheri, perhaps his dialogues are a little pat, but his mulberry tale makes up for it. There is something about the movie that is the opposite of intense. As my mother observed, he didn't look like he was suicidal at all. Perhaps that's Kiarostami's style, but although I always root for subtlety, I didn't really feel more than a curiosity for this man's quest. It gets better by the end, but is nothing compared to the haiku-like conciseness of the verse that first introduced me, irresistibly, to Abbas Kiarostami.