Taste of Cherry: The Indeterminate Mr. Badii

Author: Yuval Klein

Artwork: Ruth Havilio

In Taste of Cherry’s opening scene, the protagonist Mr. Badii is driving in Tehran. He leers at the laborers who ardently offer their service through his ajar car window. Advancing incrementally and invariably halting to assess the men, Mr. Badii is clearly searching for something – many people (myself included) would assume that that something is sex upon first viewing; but not knowing the object of his desire, one is left with the vague image of a man searching deeply to no avail, tapering off to the city outskirts thereafter. Mr. Badii’s ruminative and tormented expression is hypnotizing; a testament to this is Nicole Krauss’ wonderful New Yorker short story “Seeing Ershadi,” which essentially follows the premise that Mr. Badii’s face is so compelling that it can do something to you – “a face that remains almost completely expressionless throughout the film, and yet manages to convey a gravity and a depth of feeling that could never come from acting – that can come only from an intimate knowledge of what it is to be pushed to the brink of hopelessness.” He is quite literally confined to the edge of a cliff throughout most of the film, a narrow road suspended on the precipice of death that renders externally the disorientation he feels internally; this image is reminiscent of a metaphor of depression put forth by Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon, that "depression is not usually going over the edge itself (which soon makes you die), but drawing too close to the edge, getting to that moment of fear when you have gone so far, when dizziness has deprived you so entirely of your capacity for balance." This is not a film about violent downward spiralling rather a seething psychosomatic vertigo that occasionally surfaces to varying extents in most people's lives.

Aside from Mr. Badii, another important character featured throughout the film is his car; the two are imbricated, his vehicular enclosure serving as both an extension and signifier of his interiority. Less abstractly, the car constitutes a quasi-private environment, it is a class indicator, and offers him mobility. The latter point will be most central to my analysis of the film; the car bypasses the constraints of movement that other characters in the film are bound to, and likewise, he isn’t bound to a well-defined social role. The unconstrained Mr. Badii becomes a restless figure, seeking out a stability isomorphic with those around him. The car, after all, is a universal symbol of longing; one normally embarks on a drive in the pursuit of something: a place, a person, a safe haven, etc. The people around him have been called upon by their circumstances to do various (mostly menial) tasks, but Mr. Badii drives through an arid landscape, seeking respite from the indeterminacy of his existence. Death becomes his fixation, his de jure sisyphean conclusion; whereas for the scrap collector, it is petty gleaning; for the younger soldier, it is a stringent and collectively burdened routine; and for the security guard, a stipulation to never leave his post. But I repeat, Mr. Badii’s calling – i.e. solution – appears to be death by suicide. 

Harkening back to the symbolism of the car, there is an early scene in which he drives past two sweet little children who play giddily in an abandoned and dilapidated car – the facade is rusted and the windows are gone. One of the children pretends to ignite an engine and veer away like Mr. Badii, who hastens to leave them in their childish, rapportive excitement. The children, then, remain blissfully inert. Their car is not a means of circumnavigating the constraints of life, rather it is life with all of its constraints. The children scene is in dialogue with the film’s narrative in another important way: each successive passenger in the film is older and more capable of indulging Mr. Badii's eccentricities. Though the children aren’t technically passengers, they are in a car. Though they greet him momentarily, their worlds/vehicles are incommensurable, and thus sparsely encounter the other. More important in the narrative – age-stratified – arc is the Kurdish soldier who hitches a ride with him in pursuit of the barracks. The soldier reminds Mr. Badii of himself as a younger man; the arc ends with the final passenger, Mr. Bagheri, an older taxidermist who represents Mr. Badii in the future, that is, if he chooses to live. 

Mr. Badii approaches a scrap collector, and slyly attempts to coax him into accepting a mysterious job that would presumably supplement his meager earnings nicely. It sets a precedent for the next few characters, who refuse to err from their rigid, sisyphean routines because they lack a capaciousness of mind that would allow them to disrupt the reliable – if somewhat dull, and even miserable – quotidian order. This scrap collector performs his tedious responsibilities amidst taunting from the local children; Mr. Badii sees his pitiful situation as a prospect to exploit, a soldier to be deployed for his own ends. What Mr. Badii fails to understand is that his prospective “soldier” has been inured to his condition, has learned to tolerate his apparent privation to an extent akin to happiness. His environment is quite literally strewn with garbage, even his shirt belongs to the world of waste – and yet, his internal equanimity is as pristine as Mr. Badii’s car and grooming. Whereas the scrap collector fails to discern, nor even question, the meaning of his shirt – on which “UCLA” is pasted – Mr. Badii is in a reflective loop, stroking the world with a broken finger, so to speak (a later analogy). The only other character in the film who lives with the persistent question of why live? is Mr. Bagheri; the rest are coerced into living by occupational, institutional, and/or religious injunctions.

The first passenger to enter Mr. Badii’s car is a young soldier from Iranian Kurdistan, hitching a ride to the barracks. It seems that each passenger/interlocutor signifies aspects of Mr. Badii’s interiority; the soldier represents his nostalgic days of incurring a rigid, demanding routine and chanting in unison, collectively bearing fate with his fellow soldiers. After a protracted period of time in which Mr. Badii escorts the soldier to a mysterious job, the timid soldier inquires about the job. Mr. Badii insists that the nature of the job shouldn’t matter in lieu of the financial compensation. The rhetorical privileging of reward over task fails time and again throughout the film; still, it serves as the basis of his rhetorical posturing with the soldier, and the other potential recruits. Before finally disclosing the nature of the job to his anxious interlocutor, Mr. Badii makes the analogy of a laborer being instructed to dig foundations for a building: “Does he ask if they’re for a hospital, a lunatic asylum, a mosque, or a school? He does his job and gets his pay.” By saying this, Mr. Badii is not merely appealing to his interlocutor’s background as a laborer, but also as a soldier under the definitive command of powerful men. This is also one of many references to the process of constructing buildings; the digging of foundations is brilliantly contrasted with Mr. Badii’s own digging task – his lonesome, little vanishing act. The laborers and machines involved in the process of digging are doing such for constructive purposes. Conversely, Mr. Badii’s hole cradles his personal abyss and solitude. The construction site is a space that takes part in rather than disassociating itself from civilization, whereas Mr. Badii's hole is a pitiful, desiccated well.

Another stunning digging scene features a bulldozer casting sand around Mr. Badii, who enters the construction site in order to sulk. Partially hidden by the sand, his figure becomes somewhat less defined. The sheer scale of the site, again, stands in harsh contrast to the pitiful little pit that Mr. Badii has dug himself. Also, all of the digging – whether by bulldozing or shovelling – happens within a work environment. This is consistent with the larger point of labor dictating the movement of characters (with exception to the idling protagonist) – not only constraining their thoughts and actions, but also providing an order that sustains them. Indeed, the primary motivator of the characters is not fiscal, rather the tacit presence of labor itself; the task is more significant than the reward.

The conversation between Mr. Badii and the soldier is represented through two alternating shots: Mr. Badii from the perspective of the passenger seat, and the soldier from the perspective of the driver’s seat. However, at the point in which the soldier becomes increasingly eager to leave, the frame shifts to that of a white car navigating a sinuous road. In the vast, arid landscape, the vehicle resembles a lurking, solitary ghost. Mr. Badii finally halts the car and reveals the site of his morbid scheme. Disclosing the proposition, Mr. Badii finally reveals the motive of his idiosyncratic behavior to both passenger and audience (nearly 25 minutes into the film!).

The tired soldier immediately insists upon returning, refusing to leave the car and observe the site in spite of Mr. Badii’s insistence. Mr. Badii again probes a similar question as earlier when asking: “You’ve never seen a gravedigger?” The soldier’s retort that he’s not a gravedigger also recalls a previous scene in which the scrap collector categorically rejects any prospect of a job on account of the fact that he’s “just a scrap collector.” The topography of labor is partitioned into various mutually exclusionary occupational siloes; the tasks performed are repetitive and immutably sacrosanct, like rituals. Mr. Badii also chirps that gravediggers adjacent to them are burying twelve bodies right now; as with the construction sites, the compactness and isolation of his workspace is contrasted with larger spheres of labor. Much of his brooding to the soldier is hinged upon the fact that although this task is facile in comparison to the proximal acts of digging and burying, he isn’t able to execute it. In one more variation on the same theme, Mr. Badii appeals to the soldier’s Kurdish identity, insisting that as a person whose people fought wars and incurred suffering, the violence that’s been thrust upon him should trivialize the task before him; one rogue death pales in comparison to entire villages, dumping twenty spades of earth on a corpse pales in comparison to enacting death with his soldierly gun. As Mr. Badii ignites the car engine, finally resigning, the soldier thrusts the passenger door open and sprints towards the barracks. 

Mr. Badii greets an Afghani security guard who is stationed beside a large, immovable apparatus – alone. The guard is from Mazar-i-Sharif, which – he informs our protagonist – is the locale of Imam Ali’s tomb, a major place of pilgrimage. Noting that Imam Ali's tomb is famously in Najaf, the guard responds, “Yes, but some people think it’s in Mazar-i-Sharif.” A pilgrimage is, of course, a journey towards a sacred destination, and that destination is only sacred insofar as it’s deemed as such. Therefore, one Shi’i might find Mazar-i-Sharif to be endowed with the presence of their martyred icon, and the other not. A strange inversion of the later, famous “taste of cherry” dialogue transpires with the guard. After Mr. Badii proclaims the worksite to be “nice,” the guard retorts that it’s “nothing but earth and dust.” Mr. Badii responds, “Earth gives us all the good things.” For the Afghani, it is God who does that. Of course, Mr. Badii’s exaltation of the expanse of earth and dust takes on a lurid tone under the circumstances. He is outwardly exalting nature and beauty, but is, in fact, appreciating death and burial. Struggling to scale a ladder to the watchpost, Mr. Badii asks the guard how he’s able to climb this, that is, in spite of the significant physical exertion. The guard is used to it, of course, as all workers are. He is used to the boredom, loneliness and impassivity. For this reason, he refuses Mr. Badii’s offer for a “change of scenery.” Again, Mr. Badii struggles to gauge the reason; it doesn’t seem to him that the very existence of duty is reason enough for working and consequently foreclosing all other opportunities. 

The next passenger is an Afghani seminarist who came to visit the guard for three nights. In a wonderful dialogue, Mr. Badii attempts to convince the seminarist to act in counterpoint to religious teachings and aid in his suicide. He argues that “suicide” is not merely a word to be confined to dictionaries, rather it has a de facto application. Unlike the soldier, who becomes unresponsive upon learning of this man’s sorrows, the seminarist genuinely tries to understand what ails him. As I mentioned earlier, each successive character is older and more capable of indulging the Mr. Badii’s sorrows. The seminarist also peers at the hole at Mr. Badii’s request. Mr. Badii does not reveal the source of his ailment, asserting that he would be incapable of conveying it, that only his visceral pain allows for this sort of suicidal gnosis. It’s a striking sentiment: that pain is the organ, so to speak, with which Mr. Badii’s perceives his despair – even more so, in light of Mr. Bagheri’s later “broken finger” analogy, which, again, I promise to acknowledge soon. The seminarist validates his sentiment, but not his right to act upon it, which frustrates Mr. Badii further; the seminarist spews a banal and impersonal polemic against suicide that Mr. Badii interrupts rudely, saying that if he wanted a lecture, he would have turned to a more learned theologian, one who has finished his studies. Each passenger conveys their own raison d’etre: the soldier represents a promise of happiness, a still extant past in which satisfaction prevails through and against grit; the seminarist represents the theological argument for living, the thou shalt not destroy, and in effect, desecrate life; and the final passenger gives the most subtle – and most stirring for our protagonist – argument.

There is a beautiful shot in which Mr. Badii peers at his figure silhouetted on a hole being filled with earth by a bulldozer. His thoughts of darkness and burial are visually represented. When Mr. Badii returns to the car, the audience is introduced to Mr. Bagheri, a kind, older man. Mr. Bagheri tentatively agrees to the strange proposal, but attempts to redirect him with a personal story. Symbolically, he also instructs Mr. Badii to take the scenic route, rather than continuing to circle his little hole. The story Mr. Bagheri relays is that of his own near suicide as a young man. He intended to hang himself on a mulberry tree, a clear allusion to the tree of life. In both the Abrahamic religions and Mr. Bagheri’s story, to eat a fruit precipitates mortality rather than immortality or death, respectively – tasting them is metaphoric of experiencing the fleeting pleasure of mortality. While fastening the rope to the mulberry branch, the young Mr. Bagheri found himself observing the fruit. The pleasure and desire derived from them induced a cascading effect, whereby other nodes of mundane desire were unearthed: the opportunity to gratify others (by disseminating fruit), aesthetic delight from a twilight scenery, and so on. He then conveys the broken finger analogy, which is in fact a joke:

A Turk goes to see a doctor. He tells him, ‘When I touch my body with my finger, it hurts. When I touch my head, it hurts. My legs – it hurts. My belly, my hand – it hurts.' The doctor examines him and then tells him, ‘You’re body’s fine, but your finger is broken.’ My dear man, your mind is ill, but there’s nothing wrong with you. Change your outlook [Mr. Badii grimaces defiantly]. I had left home to kill myself, but a mullbery tree changed me, an ordinary, unimportant mullbery. The world isn’t the way you see it.

One's organs of perception can themselves be damaged and thus in need of healing. Also, the emotional response of pain is, in fact, integrated in the brain (namely, the cingulate cortex); the affective quality of pain is psychosomatic. Similar to other sensory systems, the cortical mechanisms are also quite plastic; in other words, the brain’s sensory system changes its structure–our means of perception are in perennial flux. Likewise, Mr. Bagheri reminds us that once a belief is internalized, it is prone to entropy. For Mr. Bagheri, perpetuating life allowed him to extract this latent understanding. Through questioning, he relentlessly attempts to find Mr. Badii’s metaphorical mulberry; how does hope materialize for this strange man? Perhaps the morning sky, the sunset? The (full) moon, the stars? Water from a spring? The taste of cherries? 

The final passenger offers Mr. Badii a precedent of man’s ability to change his outlook, of the human propensity for perseverance. He also offers his unconditional friendship, rather than simply carrying forth the transaction. Furthermore, Mr. Bagheri offers an alternative to suicide that, unlike his other interlocutors, isn’t divorced from his circumstances; Mr. Badii is not a young soldier and probably doesn’t believe in God. As a taxidermist, Mr. Bagheri’s job is, ironically, to exploit death. Another complexity worth acknowledging is that Mr. Bagheri’s decision to accept the money can largely be attributed to the fact that his son is severely ill, such that the compensatory reward may prolong his life. The job of the taxidermist is peculiarly not so far removed from this task, in a similar sense as – according to Mr. Badii earlier in the film – the duty of the gunslinging soldier or the farmer with his spade. Though Mr. Bagheri’s monologue seemed to have quell Mr. Badii’s will to death, the suicidal plot appears to perpetuate itself. However, darkness obscures the ultimate outcome..

In a sort of epilogue, a low resolution behind-the-scenes footage depicts soldiers marching, cameramen filming, the actor of Mr. Badii handing the director Abbas Kiarostami a cigarette, rustling trees, and finally, a car departing. Although I initially found it to be nothing more than a glib, postmodern intrusion, alas I’ve come to shed the obliquity with which I approached it. Kiarostami is wresting the narrative authority from the filmmakers and offering it to the audience. We have been given the privilege of speculating the precise orientation of the car and our protagonist.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl–a Viennese Jewish psychiatrist who found himself languishing in a harrowing concentration camp, grafted onto a perverse moral order–presents an epiphany borne on the precipice of extinction, a paradigm shift: One should not ask what one wants from life, rather what life calls upon one to do. After all, he did not choose to go to a concentration camp. For Frankl, inverting the question entailed reflecting upon his circumstances and identifying a problem he was uniquely qualified to address with his unique circumstances and sensibilities. Life had ultimately compelled him to observe human suffering, he concluded, so that he might articulate his impressions and proffer them to posterity. Analogously, Taste of Cherry is a poignant reflection on human suffering, of the push-pull dialectic between the will to live and eclipsing desire to capitulate. A man navigates a sinuous road to the gate of meaning or an abysmal terminal...