Back to Film Diary

On the Ending of TASTE OF CHERRY

This was originally a response to another member of the IMDb Message Boards in a discussion about the ending of Abbas Kiarostami's TASTE OF CHERRY:

July 24, 2002

If these Boards kept their archives beyond a year, you'd be able to find a thread in International Boards titled "The ending of TASTE OF CHERRY: what the hell was that about???" posted by yours truly. Of the handful of responses I received, it was interesting to note that some people had even forgotten about the ending (they chose to conclude their memory of the movie at the grave). Needless to say, I didn't get much help in answering my question... except that maybe I learned how the beauty of this film lies, if anywhere, in the diverse ways that different people respond to it -- which in every way mirrors how the three different men respond to Mr. Badii's request for help. It is a beautiful and rare insight on the part of the film to recognize how different we are as individuals, how we cannot possibly understand or empathize with one another fully, and yet the human urge, the mandate, is that we do everything in our power to connect.

You'd have to convince me that WINTER LIGHT achieves a similar level of insight, whether it be the same insight or another brilliant observation on human nature. If you choose to, please do it where others can see it as well.

(By the way, I am currently revisiting FANNY AND ALEXANDER for the first time in 13 years, and it's magnificent.)

Here's a great article on TASTE OF CHERRY which offers some food for thought as to the way Kiarostami provokes his audience to individualized reactions -- it also has a thoughtful interpretation of the ending. The title says it all: http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/1998/0598/05298.html

As for me, what I have come to love about the ending starts with the visual texture, ethereal and bright, which comes as such a stunner after that penultimate scene in the grave so effectively leaves us feeling dark, wet and somber. The greeness of the hills and valley comes through (thanks to the saturation of video) so much more richly than it did at the beginning of the film. For me, all of this gives me the sense of being in a kind of heaven. But I don't mean this literally, as in this is Mr. Badii's afterlife after he's killed himself -- it is (and I came to this conclusion after thinking about it over the course of months) OUR heaven as the audience, a realm we have been taken after experiencing, if only for an hour or so, the physical and spiritual reality of one man's life. But this heaven, in spite of its visual fuzziness, is very much tied into a secular reality: a bunch of guys making a movie. Watching them at work, I could feel their immense sense of joy in what they were doing at that very moment: hanging out together on a lazy sunny afternoon, getting a perverse kick out of being able to order a troop of soldiers around, sharing a cigarette and just plain loving the fact that they were alive and making a movie in the middle of glorious nature about something they cared deeply about. On the one hand, it seems like the most banal moment you could capture on film, and yet it is open to much interpretation as to how it stands on its own or compares to the rest of the film. But to put it in a simple phrase, Heaven is Here. And given the topic of the film, their obvious joy seems to offer a resounding rebuttal to the existential doubts of Mr. Badii -- except that the mournul dirge in the soundtrack reminds us of death's everlasting presence...

I can't say that my interpretation makes for a perfect fit, and it is by no means definitive, but I think a neatly packaged conclusion is the furthest thing from Kiarostami's intentions -- it would be a graver (pardon the pun) insult to the Mr. Badii's issues than this seemingly random coda he devised. Everytime I think of this ending, as I am now, I get a tremendouse sense of ecstasy, and the whole film gets a brand new life assigned to it in addition to what it was before. As you said, you wanted an open-ended conclusion -- I think the final ending gives you just that, in spades. The greatest movies take on a life of their own inside of us; as much as we want to put them away, they won't let go of our hearts and minds. I think the ending of this film does exactly that.