(originally published June 16, 2010)
Abbas Kiarostami, in Taste of Cherry, follows middle-aged Mr. Badii as he drives from the heart of Tehran into hills outside of town. Tehran’s periphery seems like a wasteland—populated mainly by construction cranes, heavy-duty excavators, and a scraggly tree by which Mr. Badii has dug his own grave. He drives without a particular destination, as if driving is its own form of meditation.
The summer after high school, I worked for Mann Theaters. The chain is best known for its Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, but less well-known was the White Suburbanite Aurora Mall Theater. I ripped tickets, slung sodas and developed a lifelong antipathy to popcorn. One woman, I recall, kept asking for more and more ‘butter.’ (We weren’t supposed to call it ‘butter’—“Would you like butter-flavor on your popcorn?”) I pumped the dispenser until I reeked of grease, until my clothes became transparent from stains—and she still wanted more. She left with an inch of hot liquid in her bag, a lawsuit waiting to happen.
On nights when I had a closing shift, I left at 11:30 but didn’t go home right away. Instead, I drove to the outskirts of Aurora, curious to see where major thoroughfares ended: Alameda, Mississippi, Colfax. As I traveled, the city devolved. Sodium lights and strip malls gave way to residential neighborhoods, and from there, the clusters of houses thinned, giving way to farmland. Agricultural machinery as architecture: long arches of industrial irrigators, thick walls of vegetation.
In one scene from Taste of Cherry, Mr. Badii exits his car to watch a cement-making operation. As bulldozers push red dirt and rocks from the top of a hill into a metal grate at the bottom, dust settles onto Mr. Badii’s hair and shoulders until he looks like he’s doubled in age. I only left my car when the roads turned into gravel. You’d think that farm land would be devoid of light, but you’d be wrong: there are lights on the silos, lights on towers, lights on the occasional passing vehicle. But it wasn’t the constant glow of the city. I could see stars.
Near the end of the film, Mr. Badii stares into the stormy Iranian sky. His face is impassive, with no indication of what he’s thinking. I can’t rightly say that on those quiet summer nights before college, I knew what I was thinking either. Maybe typical teenage meditations on Life and Death. I didn’t have passengers off which I could bounce my ideas: no soldiers, no seminarians, no taxidermists. But for a moment, I, like Mr. Badii, could feel alive. The black, fresh air; the solitude; my parents’ Honda humming quietly as the engine ran itself down.
The actual end of Taste of Cherry, of course, features a ‘making of’ video embedded in the film itself as Kiarostami shoots a scene. It reminds the audience of the difference between the movies and ‘real life.’ Kiarostami speaks into a walkie-talkie, instructing a platoon of ‘soldiers’ to stop marching. The soldiers relax on the side of a hill, picking flowers, throwing dirt clods at one another. But the closest equivalent for a ‘making of’ reel in real life is, perhaps, its re-creation in writing. Look: there’s me, sitting at a keyboard, moist with June sweat, remembering another summer almost twenty years past.