Tehran Master

By RICHARD CORLISS

Fellow goes to a doctor and says, "Everything's wrong with me, but I don't know what disease I have. I touch my head, and it hurts. I touch my chest, and it hurts. I touch my leg, and it hurts. What's the problem?" The doctor examines him and says, "Your finger's broken."

This joke, told in Abbas Kiarostami's luminous Taste of Cherry, hints at the spirit of Iran's vital new cinema: knowing, poignant, as simple and universally significant as an Aesop fable. Kiarostami, who is Iran's leading director (Through the Olive Trees) and screenwriter (The White Balloon), tells his tales with the grace and gravity of a wise old man in a village square. Taste of Cherry, which won the top prize at Cannes last year, is the finest of his shaggy-man stories.

A man named Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives around Tehran looking for someone who will do a little job for a lot of money. The profane and sacred task, we eventually learn, is to bury Badii if he is successful in a suicide attempt and to rescue him if he is not. The story is starkly allusive--we never learn why Badii wants to kill himself--and most of the "action" takes place in the cab of Badii's Range Rover, but the film isn't cramped or schematic. The talk flows persuasively; the picture pulses with art and humanity.

Here is a suspense thriller cast as a Socratic conversation. By Hollywood's pulse, the film may amble, but this is a token of its respect for each speaker's beliefs, its refusal to sentimentalize matters of life or death. Let the rest of the movie world ride a rocket to excess; Kiarostami will find a quiet place and listen to a man's heart right until it stops beating. And then he will listen some more.

--R.C.