45 Taste of Cherry

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dda1996a
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#51 Post by dda1996a » Tue Jul 21, 2020 12:12 pm

I started with Close -Up and then Certified Copy and I think you can't go wrong with those two, but the Joker Trilogy also works great. I don't think one should start with Wind because I found seeing the rest before added to it, but that's me...

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knives
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#52 Post by knives » Tue Jul 21, 2020 12:16 pm

That autocorrect really makes me now really want a movie of Phoenix driving around a red lit desert pondering how the body is connected to the soul.

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domino harvey
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#53 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jul 21, 2020 12:19 pm

I knew it was a typo because the proper term of respect is “the Joker Thrillogy

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Finch
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#54 Post by Finch » Tue Jul 21, 2020 8:13 pm

Thank you all for your replies, much appreciated. The Wind Will Carry Us it is then, and I believe the Criterion Channel has a free 14 day trial so I think I should find Close Up on there.

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TheKieslowskiHaze
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#55 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Tue Jul 21, 2020 10:41 pm

Tommaso wrote:
Mon Jul 20, 2020 7:26 pm
It was the first Kiarostami I ever saw, and it almost managed to turn me off from a director who I now consider to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.
I felt this way about Certified Copy, a movie for which, upon first watch, I did not understand the praise. I like it much more now, after having seen other Kiarostami movies.

Kiarostami, like Don Delillo and Robert Altman, did not blow me away at first. It wasn't until I watched more of his stuff that I appreciated thematic interests and aesthetic preferences, ones I still find interesting and moving in his oeuvre as a whole (same re Delillo, Altman).

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FrauBlucher
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#56 Post by FrauBlucher » Tue Jul 21, 2020 11:10 pm

Finch, definitely watch Close Up after you watch The Wind Will Carry Us. I am not a fan of Taste of Cherry which I have seen recently for the first time. The premise was of interest to me, but...
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I was expecting the characters to have deep theoretical and philosophical conversations about life, death, religion and suicide. There wasn't any of that. It was all kind of shallow IMHO

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knives
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#57 Post by knives » Wed Jul 22, 2020 6:34 am

Sometimes the greatest depth is just being.

accatone
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#58 Post by accatone » Wed Jul 22, 2020 6:49 am

knives wrote:
Wed Jul 22, 2020 6:34 am
Sometimes the greatest depth is just being.
Seconded. And isn't it exactly the quality of Kiarostamis Cinema to tell this through "everyday-images / situations" without going the Theater way of just filming staged dialog where the quality is in the Text and not (neccessarily) in the imgae and sound?

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knives
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#59 Post by knives » Wed Jul 22, 2020 8:50 am

It actually reminds me of Rossellini's stated goals with the history films showing ideas in action rather than verbally dissecting them, which you could go to Rohmer to for pleasure. We learn a lot more about man's sense of purpose, what I believe to be Cherry's main theme, from the way casual conversation doesn't change events then explicitly having a back and forth seemingly could.

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FrauBlucher
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#60 Post by FrauBlucher » Wed Jul 22, 2020 10:23 am

knives wrote:
Wed Jul 22, 2020 6:34 am
Sometimes the greatest depth is just being.
I agree to a certain extent. I'm a fan of Bela Tarr's cinema. The main character here wasn't just going to mail a letter. He wanted someone to help him while he killed himself. Certainly deeper conversations amongst the characters are warranted. I guess my expectations were much different and perhaps I needed to read up on this before I saw it

The other thing was I had no feelings for the main character. I found him boring

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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#61 Post by accatone » Wed Jul 22, 2020 11:16 am

FrauBlucher wrote:
Wed Jul 22, 2020 10:23 am
The other thing was I had no feelings for the main character. I found him boring
Funnily, i could extremly relate to Mr. Badii's meandering through the countryside. There is some strange irony (or arrogance) in the way he talks to strangers that most certainly comes from a different cultural background in regards to the character but also the country the film was shot in. There are very strong existantial-ist undertones but sans the European gloom (not sure if gloom is the right word, German is "Schwermut"…) that i really like and that were for me very new when i saw my first Kiarostami film (that was indeed Tast of Cherry).

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tenia
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#62 Post by tenia » Wed Jul 22, 2020 11:54 am

It was also interesting to see that as the movie goes, the people he encounters are older but also more and more open to his idea. You'd expect younger people to convey some kind of more naive open-mind but it's actually the opposite. I guess in this regard, Kiarostami's siding with experience and earned-through-life wisdom as being better, but it still surprised me in some ways.

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TheKieslowskiHaze
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#63 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Sun Jul 26, 2020 10:07 am

TheKieslowskiHaze wrote:
Mon Jul 20, 2020 12:25 pm
Got this as a blind buy, as I've loved every Kiarostami I've ever seen (especially the Koker trilogy). Held off seeing this until a good transfer existed. Should I be excited?
I liked it a lot.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#64 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Nov 01, 2020 9:46 pm

tenia wrote:
Wed Jul 22, 2020 11:54 am
It was also interesting to see that as the movie goes, the people he encounters are older but also more and more open to his idea. You'd expect younger people to convey some kind of more naive open-mind but it's actually the opposite. I guess in this regard, Kiarostami's siding with experience and earned-through-life wisdom as being better, but it still surprised me in some ways.
Good point, though I’d reframe it as that they were more open to empathizing instead of being uncomfortably repelled (the young solider) or redirecting the conversation (the Afghani). There is definitely a component of the old man near the end being more at peace with compromising one moral for another in monetary provisions for his children, holding values as distinguishable but not hierarchal. There’s also a hint of a kind of realistic spiritual ascension that’s been produced through lived experience in a hard and complex social environment.

I got the sense that Kiarostami is meditating on his own expanded worldview that has come with age, by demonstrating how regardless of diverse backgrounds, these people have grappled with life’s pains and contemplated similar existential concerns. This includes the old man’s admissions of posturing at nihilism and engaging in suicidal acts himself, and that validation of the main character’s movement from ideation to intent is in the wisdom from a humbled accumulation of living.

The old man’s advice that a changed outlook can change the world is accurate (as is the wonderful allegory that each season brings fruit) but the main character’s inability to escape his mental health and his claim that no one can feel his specific pain are also subjective truths that can’t be argued against. No one can provide him with meaning and purpose, because no one can unlock that expanded peripheral focus outside of one’s agony toward the spiritual that exists around us.

I actually find the coda successful because it gives us this objective ‘answer’ by removing us from the protagonist’s subjectivity. I like the rebirth readings, but ultimately this film feels like Kiarostami empathizing with both the narrowness we feel when isolated in pain, and also presenting the solution as one right in front of our eyes, however invisible during suffering, which yields the symptom of solipsism. There is ubiquitous beauty in each interaction and detail of our perceptions when we can lift our heads up and greet the world with acceptance, but he’s hesitant to shame anyone who can’t. By distancing us at the end, we are reminded of this truth from a position of neutrality, which is the kind of evidence we need to gather throughout our lives to prepare for the moments when access is strained.

In that sense it’s a gift to the audience, with a message of: We’re all in this together. Here is a reminder than there is reason to live, and that there does exist an alternate, bearable, even transcendent perspective - no matter how bad it gets - that is also Truth. Life has many dimensions, and the removal from the narrative is like peeling back the onion layers of reality to find new vantage points to gaze from- a form of growth that mirrors as an affirmation that there is always room to advance our minds and hearts.

I do think that his hasty return to the man to ask him to throw stones and shake him, ensuring his own peaceful death, is a sign of desperation for social connection and co-regulative support, not only self-preservation. It’s also highlighting the ultimate desire he seeks: serenity, or more aptly, the alleviation of dysphoria. If he is only sleeping he will not have actually succeeded in finding that harmony, that permanent state of relief, and he considers that a failure. So even in suicide he’s searching for a meaningful state of being.

I appreciate how the coda doesn’t point to any specific answer in what or where that meaning is, but draws us back just enough to attend to various sounds, people, physical spaces to move through, interactions of affinity in sharing a cigarette or communicating, and letting us fill in the gaps of how many infinite opportunities we ourselves can find to mine for meaning in our vicinities right now.

Like most of the director’s 90s period outside of Close-Up, I didn’t care for this film when I first saw it, but he’s a filmmaker that has really grown on me over time, and I absolutely loved this one on a second watch.

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TheKieslowskiHaze
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#65 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Sun Nov 01, 2020 10:24 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Sun Nov 01, 2020 9:46 pm
I got the sense that Kiarostami is meditating on his own expanded worldview that has come with age, by demonstrating how regardless of diverse backgrounds, these people have grappled with life’s pains and contemplated similar existential concerns. This includes the old man’s admissions of posturing at nihilism and engaging in suicidal acts himself, and that validation of the main character’s movement from ideation to intent is in the wisdom from a humbled accumulation of living.
Yeah, I think often about the scene in which the protagonist first explains his plan to another character and, by extension, to the audience.
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He is so beautifully framed and lit, the magic hour sunlight, him standing tall over the the expansive scenery behind him. And yet he's talking about suicide. He seems almost heroic. It's incongruous and beautiful. I think Kiarostami has a deep respect for the man's reasoning and his worldview, even if the movie will ultimately reject those later (maybe). That scene just really hits me.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#66 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Nov 01, 2020 11:07 pm

I agree, though I don't think the film rejects the worldview so much as offers an alternative to us, the neutral party, to remind us that there exist both truths. He absolutely respects the character, mostly by surrendering any judgmental rejection he feels the urge to profess from an objective angle, knowing full well that when we're in that state it's not easy- and certainly not fair to assume the protagonist can unlock his own answers with the information we, and not he, have in our expansive dissociation from his pain (which the character makes quite clear). Kiarostami excels more than most filmmakers at holding seemingly opposing truths together in a holistic method, often supported by layering these perspectives in the medium's tools themselves.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but the film's ending seems like a message to us the audience, who have earned supreme validation by this point after a gradual process of being granted permission to sit with our own vulnerabilities and accept them. Kiarostami's invitation has been extended through the passengers, who can mirror our own acclimation. At first we are like the soldier, appalled at the part of us that remains hidden in our subconscious, feeling unsafe coming out to voice its concerns over misery's potential permanency, and scream its pain. Then we become the Afghani who can tolerate the conversation but wants to redirect and bury those feelings with the distraction of a nice meal. Finally, we are the old man, wise and willing to engage with this part, acknowledging its existence and powerful hold on us, but still not willing to be a complete ally, refusing silence or an unquestioning role. Our own existential progression of becoming comfortable with traveling to these vulnerable spaces is also actualized through our alignment with the protagonist as he spends time alone between the passenger convos and finally in the last act as he casts his attention towards the sunset, where we see beauty via the passengers' objectively but also nothingness through his hopeless subjectivity.

As you allude to, TheKieslowskiHaze, there is too much respect for his unique reasoning to even forge a harmonious alliance via an outlet in the last passenger, since we are reminded, 'Who are we to do any more than 'help' since we cannot ever know his pain?' - and so Kiarostami never pretends to give insight that only God and the protagonist can 'know', instead he 'helps' through exercising his skills at manipulating the medium's methodology to bifurcate our 'comprehension' of his woes as related from our own experience, and also to see 'beyond' such pain toward something greater.

The coda feels like a reminder that we can all fall prey to our psychological anguish that blocks peripheral vision, and that our ability to recognize this part of us and engage in processing its existence with dignity, while also concentrating on a grander scope of enlightenment, will hopefully work those spiritual muscles and help us shift out of this destructive rabbit hole in the future. I guess I see the film as a therapeutic gift of sorts, but maybe I'm assuming Kiarostami is much more interested in directing his empathy toward his audience than he intends.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#67 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Nov 01, 2020 11:55 pm

I've always viewed that last supplemental request as a hint that the protagonist has begun to consider that he now has a choice to make and is not obliged to follow the course he had initially seen as his only option.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#68 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Nov 02, 2020 12:16 am

I think it works that way too - by this point he's shown some willingness to seek support and, with that validation from the final passenger, possibly ventured on the brink of a willingness to engage with other perspectives. I've been viewing this as a one-way observation from us toward him (and his 'unknowability') but what if it is flowing both way? I can see the film's narrative, alternatively, ascribing a parable-type relationship with the protagonist seeing these three passengers incrementally reflecting segregates messages towards himself: fear, insecurity, and love in loyalty, that together form a holistic revelation, planting a seed of inspiration that grows as he sits in contemplation.

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Re: 45 Taste of Cherry

#69 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Nov 02, 2020 10:34 am

I also felt a little lukewarm towards this on first viewing (unlike my wholly warm reaction to some of his other films), but I have loved this more -- and found it richer and richer -- with each re-viewing.

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