A saturnine looking bloke as you can see. With sad eyebrows.
He’s dug himself a hole up on the hill next to a solitary tree. Now he’s driving around looking for someone who will do the dirty deed.
What deed you ask? Its the question the blokes that climb in the car with him are wondering about too. Is he a lonely gay cruising about looking for a bit of pervy action?
No. It’s much pervier than that. He wants them to bury him. In the hole. After he’s killed himself.
You don’t know what he wants for the first 20 minutes or so. Which makes this first 20 minutes or so seem kind of laboured. He picks up a young soldier; lots of questions and stilted talk; the soldier runs away as soon as he – Mr Badii – makes his unusual request.
So now we know; we know he wants to die – and the film notches up a poignant gear or 2; his looking now looks like a last looking at life – a witnessing, a final saying of goodbye.
After the soldier, comes an Islamic seminarist; he’s obviously not going to assist a suicide; the third person he picks up will tho – a taxidermist.
For a third time the car is circling up and around that dusty earthy hill; the scientist tells him a personal anecdote: “I left home to kill myself; i came back with mulberries. A mulberry saved my life“. It’s up to the scientist to give Mr Badii the justification for continuing his life: “You want to give up the taste of cherries?” He does.
Altho his resolve wobbles a fraction. Yet he wants to. We never find out why he wants to. But he has had enough.
He sits on a bench and looks at the sun setting on the horizon. He’s driven by taxi up the dusty hill in the dark to his dug hole by the single windy tree. It’s thundering. He looks at the gliterry lights of the life still being lived below. He smokes a final cigarette.
Gets into his hole. Dogs bark. The moon. The thunder. Lightening. Rain. Eyes close. Blackness. Mr Badii died.
And then Kiarostami tacks on one of these tricksy po-mo endings to get us – as audience – to be self-reflexively conscious that we just watched a film. I was irritated by it. He – the director – is the illusionist; and we - the consumers – are the disillusioned. So what? I don’t need you to rub it in Kiarostami. I get it. Now stop doing it (he’s done this in other films too)
I’ve seen this film 4 or 5 times now. This time i didn’t feel suicidal enough to be fully soaked inside its gloomy existential mood.
But i suppose i’ll return to it again – one day, and watch it more appropriately.
Dir: Abbas Kiarostami, Iran
7.5/10
