A Taste of Cherry

A man drives around villages and the desert hills offering a series of carefully selected men a lift and unusually well paid work; he's not looking for a pick-up but, as we discover after a while, someone to help in his planned suicide. Characteristically, Kiarostami's Palme d'Or winner is low on narrative drive, slowly but steadily revealing more and more information, visual and verbal, until we are totally caught up in his protagonist's psychological and ethical dilemma. (Suicide is forbidden to Muslims.) As ever, the subtle, deceptively simple mise-en-scène speaks volumes, notably a nightmare of noisy industrialism in the desert, and the remarkable penultimate scene, which goes even further in its minimalist ambiguity than the final shots of the last two movies of Kiarostami's trilogy.