When a Cherry Saves the World: Kiarostami and the Art of Sensing Life
- The Epicurer
- 25 nov 2025
- 3 Min. de lectura
There are films that speak loudly, and there are films that breathe. Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry belongs to the second category — a work where silence has more weight than language, where the desert becomes a diary, and where the simplest sensory memory can tilt the entire meaning of existence.
In a film sculpted from dust, solitude, and long drives that circle the same hills again and again, the most powerful moment arrives from something almost invisible: the memory of tasting a piece of fruit under the shade of a mulberry tree. The story is recounted by a man who once stood at a personal precipice, a moment when life felt dimmed to the point where he could no longer sense its texture. Then, unexpectedly, he reached for a mulberry warmed by the sun. In that instant — the sweetness, the slight acidity, the warmth on his lips — something shifted. The world, which had seemed emptied of meaning, returned through flavor. A single taste restored a connection to life that words could not. It is this tiny, luminous moment that gives the film its title: the idea that the taste of a cherry, or of any fruit, might be enough to remind someone that being alive is not an abstraction but a sensation.
This is Kiarostami’s genius. As one of the greatest filmmakers Iran has ever produced — and truly one of the most extraordinary minds in the history of cinema — he understands that life’s deepest questions are not answered in grand declarations, but in the smallest sensory encounters: the rustle of leaves, the grain of soil beneath the fingers, the glimmer of sunlight on a hillside, the taste of ripe fruit dissolving on the tongue. He elevates simplicity to philosophy. The ordinary becomes metaphysical. Throughout Taste of Cherry, the landscape mirrors the protagonist’s inner terrain. Those bare hills and dusty paths are not merely locations; they are the emotional architecture of a man searching for a reason to continue. Yet Kiarostami refuses melodrama. Instead, he lets encounters unfold with the gentle precision of a haiku: a soldier startled by an unusual request, a seminarist anchored in ethical dilemmas, and finally, the taxidermist whose story introduces the mulberry — the sensory lifeline that interrupts despair. It is not a speech, nor an argument. It is a memory of taste. And that is enough to change the weight of the air.
The symbolism is exquisite: life is beautiful not because it is perfect or grand, but because it is filled with fragile pleasures so small that we forget their power. A cherry, a mulberry, a sip of tea, the shade of a tree — these are not trivial; they are the very things that anchor us to the world. Life reveals itself through flavor. Through the body. Through presence. And when Kiarostami places a piece of fruit at the center of an existential reflection, he is making a radical claim: that the simplest experiences can carry the deepest meaning.
The ending — that quiet rupture where fiction dissolves and we glimpse the crew, the camera, the larger world — is Kiarostami’s final gesture of compassion. He reminds us that life continues, that breath continues, that the world is still moving around us no matter how heavy our inner storms may feel. It is as if the film itself is offering the viewer a cherry, inviting them to rediscover the beauty that resides in the smallest corner of existence.
In a time where spectacle dominates and cinema often chases noise, Taste of Cherry remains a whisper of extraordinary force. It tells us that life does not need to be monumental to be precious. It needs only to be tasted — slowly, fully, with the attention we rarely give to anything anymore.
Kiarostami gives us this gift: a reminder that flavor is a philosophy, that simplicity can be salvation, and that sometimes the entire meaning of being alive can hide inside something as small and radiant as a cherry.
