‘Taste of Cherry’: Agnès Varda’s favourite film about “the desire to die”
The favourite films of great directors can reveal a lot about their influences, their passions, and how they view cinema as an art form. That’s why it’s particularly interesting that Agnès Varda, a filmmaker whose career began in the 1950s, counted a movie released in 1997 among her favourites.
Varda, a titan of the French New Wave, was pivotal in shaping the country’s cinematic landscape into something endlessly experimental and brave – while she is often overshadowed by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Varda brought a vital feminism to the nouvelle vague through her exploration of feminine issues, from the pressures of the male gaze to abortion, which made her a real hero of the movement.
But she was also preoccupied with death. Considering that so much patriarchal oppression has long resulted in high mortality rates for women – take back street abortions, for example – it makes sense that Varda was as interested in death as she was in feminine representation.
Not only that, death stands as one of the few truly uniting human experiences, an inescapable truth that will never fail to mystify, its depth just too great to understand, or even to fathom. That’s why Varda loves Taste of Cherry so much, Abbas Kiarostami’s quiet meditation on mortality, told from the perspective of a middle-aged man set on committing suicide.
The film sees Homayoun Ershadi’s Mr Badii approach various individuals, asking them to bury him when he kills himself. He reflects on life in the process, with the movie ultimately ending ambiguously, Kiarostami breaking the fourth wall.
Varda had already explored death with movies like Cléo from 5 to 7, her first masterpiece, and Vagabond before the release of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. In fact, there’s certainly a parallel to be found between the fourth wall break in Vagabond, which sees Varda telling the audience about the discovery of a body, and the ending of Taste of Cherry, in which camcorder footage of the film crew, including Kiarostami, shows the creation of the movie.
Picking out the film during her trip to the Criterion Closet, Varda said, “One of my favourite films. Kiarostami, Taste of Cherry… Because you know the thing about the desire to die – and we know that we are dust, we’ll come back to dust – he made it in such a huge set of stone dust, and the man trying to find his own way, and the way he tried to be helped.”
“The strength of life – the taste of cherry – wins over. I love that film, really.”
Agnès Varda
Varda’s appreciation for Kiarostami’s gentle, minimalist approach to death certainly resonated with her, but she’s not alone in her assessment of its brilliance – scooping up the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie has since been labelled a masterpiece, and while Roger Ebert might have called the movie “excruciatingly boring”, he was in the minority.
Varda understood the lyrical beauty of the film, which was always her go-to when asked to select her favourite, even if it did come out much closer to the end of her career than the beginning.
