11 days to go: The Taste of Cherry (March, 28)

"Oh can it be

The voices calling me

They get lost 

And out of time

I should've seen it glow

But everybody knows

That a broken heart is blind"

And it cannot even enjoy the taste of Cherry

Ta'm e guilass (translated as Taste of Cherry) was the Kiarostami movie of the day. I was still under the influence of The Wind will Carry Us. I wanted to wander on that melancholic feel of living again. I knew the plot from the imdb.com summary - it would be interesting not knowing anything at all, though. The character's pursuit among all the vastness of a beautiful overwhelming dry scenery, filled even so with small peaces of heaven and full of different people that meet his way, is something to be aware at bits, not all at once. His perception of life and death is stuck in a dark place, and probably no one or anything will be able to take him out of it. 

The quiet, still fierce, contemplation of what makes life worth (or not) of living is here too, as it was in the small village. A character in movement, a passenger in a car (in life?), things that we can almost not perceive, the matter of life passing through the window... That's Kiarostami, who will be terribly missed for sure. With his poetic and peculiar camera, he shoots what is intangible also by choosing no actors to establish many improvised dialogues with the main characters. Some things are said and not understood, others stay with us for a long time.

The end is a sarcastic attempt to skip the Iranian censorship by telling: see, folks?, it's "just" a movie, nothing's real here. Oh, if just it was so simple as that (I'm thankful that it is not).

Ta'm e guilass. Directed and written by Abbas Kiarostami. Cast:
Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Sfshin Khorshid. Iran,/
France, 1997, Stereo, Color, 95 min.  

PS: Little Black Submarines just woke up with me today. A fit company to Kiarostami's movie.