Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up and Taste of cherry

Last weekend I got a chance to watch Kiarostami’s two movies Close-up and Taste of Cherry. I always have the zeal for Iranian cinema ever since I watched Children of Heaven.

I would say Close-up is more of a special report of a true story happened in Iran. It is about an individual who claims him to be a director Mohsen Makhmalbaf who directed Cyclist and gets in touch with a family. But when I got the DVD I didn’t know that this is such kind of movie where I was expecting something of Majidi Style. In the end, it is a different way of depicting an individual’s mind and his feelings.

I was more hesitant to watch this Taste of Cherry due to the effect of watching Close-up as I didn’t want to watch documentary kinda movies back to back. But you would get the feel of different taste in it. It is all about a man who wants to commit suicide and he is finding for someone to close the ditch which he had already made so that he can go and sleep having the sleeping pills. In the end, I didn’t get what he is trying to say in the climax. I had to do some research on that movie and found something here. Kiarostami refers to this style as “Unfinished Cinema”.

You get a different feeling after watching these movies that you would not get it in any other commercial movie. I got it after watching it. I would recommend it as a case study for all the movie fanatics.