The “excruciatingly boring” Palme d’Or-winning movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion
While it’s never really been a barometer of the American awards season, for the most part, bad movies don’t win the Palme d’Or. However, on one occasion, Roger Ebert thoroughly disagreed.
Being awarded the top honour from the Cannes Film Festival has always been viewed as one of the industry’s supreme badges of honour, and while there are many victors who’d proven contentious, either in their own time or retrospectively, they’re easily outweighed by the stone-cold classics.
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, and the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink are just some of the masterpieces that claimed the prize, and a recurring theme is that most of them didn’t sniff ‘Best Picture’ at the Academy Awards.
The Palme d’Or is dictated and awarded on different criteria to most of the most recognised ceremonies on the calendar, but at the very least, it has to be unanimously decided by the jury that a picture is deserving of the accolade. It can end in a tie, though, and one of 1997’s joint winners didn’t earn much praise at all from Ebert.
For the last five decades, Abbas Kiarostami has repeatedly shown himself to be one of the most urgent, incisive, and important voices in filmmaking. Taste of Cherry is roundly regarded as one of his finest works, and shared the Palme d’Or with Shōhei Imamura’s The Eel, not that Ebert was convinced of its merits.
“I thought I had seen an emperor without any clothes,” he wrote in a one-star review, suggesting he didn’t understand the hype. “A case can be made for the movie, but it would involve transforming the experience of viewing the film (which is excruciatingly boring) into something more interesting, a fable about life and death. Just as a bad novel can be made into a good movie, so can a boring movie be made into a fascinating movie review.”
Most critics were enraptured by Kiarostami’s tale of a man on a mission to kill himself, with Homayoun Ershadi’s Mr Badii seeking assistance in being buried after the fact. After some trial and error, he finally finds someone willing to handle the task, only for them to try to talk him out of committing suicide.
Taste of Cherry is a moving, powerful drama, unless you were Ebert, who described the auteur’s style as “an affectation” and said that “the subject matter does not make it necessary, and is not benefited by it.” He appreciated the sentiment behind it, which he was at pains to point out, but he didn’t enjoy the film in the slightest
“Yes, there is a humanistic feeling underlying the action. Yes, an Iranian director making a film on the forbidden subject of suicide must have courage. Yes, we applaud the stirrings of artistic independence in the strict Islamic republic,” he concluded. “But is Taste of Cherry a worthwhile viewing experience? I say it is not.”
He’s entitled to his opinion, but he was firmly in the minority.
