The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Abbas Kiarostami · a film in Persian · 1997 · about 95 minutes
Mode
Road film reduced to one request; parable, chamber drama in a car and reflexive coda in one
Mythos
Death and return: a grave dug before the story, a tree above it, a night, and an awakening not shown; the comforters who come in turn
Phase
One day and one night on the hills outside Tehran, from the first approach to the dark, and then a spring day on video
Presentation
Feature film, about 95 minutes, in Persian; most of it two men in a car in shot and reverse shot, the rest long shots of the car on the hill roads; a closing coda on video
Register
Hard ochre light, dust and machinery, voices carried level over distance; then lightning, rain and a black screen; then green
Scale
One man, four listeners, a hill and a hole
Governing Proposition
A man drives the edges of Tehran looking for someone who will come to a hole under a tree in the morning and put earth over him, and three men in turn hear the request. The wager of the film is that a life is chosen only where death is free, that a man who asks for help in dying is asking, without knowing it, to be refused in terms he can accept, and that a feature film can run on that request alone, its motive withheld and its ending handed back to the living.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A man drives slowly along the outskirts of Tehran, where men stand waiting for day work. He looks at them, slows, and approaches some of them, and others besides, with an offer he does not yet state. The ground is dust and gravel, the hills are bare, and the roads are switchbacks cut into the slopes. Nothing is explained: not who he is, not what he wants, not why he wants it. The film begins in the middle of a search and lets the viewer watch it for some time before knowing its object.
The man is Mr Badii, played by Homayoun Ershadi: middle-aged, prosperous, alone in a Range Rover. The film will never give his reason. Most of it is two men in that car, in shot and reverse shot, each in his own frame, side by side and never together; the rest is long shots of the car on the hill roads, small in the landscape, while the voices go on at the same level as if they were near. The pattern of the whole film is set in its first reel: a man close to others, and alone.
Abbas Kiarostami wrote, directed, produced and edited the film, under its Persian title Ta’m e guilass, and Homayun Payvar photographed it. It runs about 95 minutes, though listings give anything from 95 to 99, and it exists in one cut, the coda included. At Cannes in 1997 it shared the Palme d’Or with Shohei Imamura’s The Eel. Beside Ershadi, the principal listeners are played by Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Mir Hossein Noori and Abdolrahman Bagheri.
Movement II
The first passenger is a young Kurdish soldier on leave, played by Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari. He rides beside Badii, and the talk turns on the army and on Badii’s own memories of service. The car climbs into the hills, and the conversation runs on in the two frames, the offer still unstated.
On a hillside Badii stops by a tree. Beneath it a hole has already been dug. The grave exists before the story does, and only now is the request made: that the young man come to this place in the morning and put earth over the man who will be lying in it. The soldier hears it and runs from the car, down the slope, and the film lets him go. The first ground of refusal is fear, and it is the simplest.
The hill will come back. The camera will hold it again at night, and the slope the soldier ran down is the slope the film returns to. Kiarostami does not argue the soldier’s refusal or judge it; he lets it stand as the first of three answers, and Badii, unmoved, drives on to find another listener.
Movement III
Between the encounters lies the arid stretch. Badii stops at the gravel works, where a hopper tips earth and the dust settles over his shadow. Machines move earth from one place to another, which is what he is asking a man to do for him. The film holds these moments flat, without event, and the flatness is deliberate: it is the ground against which anything that rises later will rise.
At a building site Badii meets an Afghan guard and the guard’s cousin, a seminarian, played by Mir Hossein Noori. The war in Afghanistan stands behind them both. The seminarian hears the request and answers it from religious law. Badii hears him out and is not moved. The second ground of refusal is law.
This is the slackest of the three encounters. The seminarian’s argument is known before he speaks it, and the scene lacks the tautness of the soldier’s. But it is needed: the film is testing grounds for refusal one by one, and law is one of them. Badii has now been refused by fear and by law, and neither has touched the thing he wants.
Movement IV
The third man is Bagheri, an Azeri taxidermist at the natural history museum, played by Abdolrahman Bagheri. He agrees. He needs the money for his child, who is sick, and he does not refuse what is asked of him. He is the first listener to say yes, and the first to argue for life from inside the request rather than from outside it.
He asks Badii to take the longer road, and as the car goes through trees and late light he tells the story of the mulberry tree. Once he too stood at a tree meaning to die, and he chose its fruit. The film lifts here from argument into gratitude, and the dust gives way, for a while, to leaves. The man who preserves dead birds in a museum is the one who speaks for the living, because he is the one who has stood where Badii stands.
Badii leaves him, and then turns back. He returns to the museum, among the preserved birds, to add a condition to their agreement. Then the film goes with him toward the night.
Movement V
Night. Badii goes out to the hill and lies down in the hole under the tree. The moon is behind cloud; there is thunder, and then rain, and his face is lit in flashes by the lightning. Then the screen goes dark and stays dark. The film does not show whether he wakes. The viewer is left in the black with him, by the plainest means cinema has.
Then the image returns, on video, in spring green. The same hill is crowded: soldiers rest on it, a crew is at work, the camera is seen, and Homayoun Ershadi, the man who lay in the grave, stands among them and smokes. An instrumental “St. James Infirmary” plays. The fiction has broken, at the point where every convention would require an answer, and what is shown instead is the making of the film and the living who go on.
At Cannes the coda was mocked as well as honoured, and it is argued still: whether it is consolation, a reminder that the film was only a film, or an image of the life Badii would return to. It refuses the plot’s question and answers the film’s, which was never whether a man dies, but whether a life is chosen. The earth on the hill is moved by labourers in the day and lies quiet under soldiers at rest in the coda, and the film ends among the people it set out from.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is passed by the frame: one man, one request, a refusal and an acceptance, the night, the waking. The repetitions are the content: the same road, the same hill, the same tree, the same offer reworded for each listener, and each listener tests a different ground for refusing, fear, law and life. Bagheri’s story needs the two refusals before it. What gives is in the middle. The opening approaches run long before the offer is made, and the seminarian’s scene is slack where the soldier’s was taut, its argument known before it is spoken. The coda is required by the design, though a viewer may feel the night’s darkness had already answered.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the freedom to die is the condition under which a life is chosen, and a man who asks for help in dying is asking, without knowing it, to be refused in terms he can accept. Law refuses him and fear refuses him, and he is not moved; only a man who once stood at such a tree and chose its fruit speaks from inside the choice. A second disclosure is given in image and never said: a prosperous Tehrani in a good car finds at the city’s edges a Kurd, an Afghan and an Azeri, each needing money. Held at the gate because the man is withheld, and the second truth is shown more than opened.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation is rare, and the film is built to make it rare. The arid stretch, earth tipped from a hopper and dust settling over Badii’s shadow, is a deliberate flatness against which three things rise. Bagheri’s story, told on the longer road he insists on, through trees and late light, lifts the film from argument into gratitude. The night is the summit: Badii in the hole, the moon behind cloud, thunder and rain, his face lit by lightning, then the black screen held, a terror of plain means. The coda lifts as a sudden green after the ochre, though some feel it as deflation. The height is real; the frequency is low by design, and frequency counts.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The archetype is built in one respect: the grave is dug before the story begins, and the man lies down in it. The descent into earth, the tree over it, the night and an awakening the film will not show are the oldest pattern of death and return, and they carry the structure. The listeners come in turn like the comforters of a parable, with three answers, and the last has been where the hero is: the taxidermist, who preserves dead birds, argues for the living. The mulberry and the cherry make the tree of knowledge a tree of taste. Held below the gate because the figures are stripped to their function, a car, a hill, a hole, and the coda deliberately unmakes the pattern.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is Kiarostami’s own: the car journeys of And Life Goes On (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), the non-professional face, the long shot of a vehicle on a hill, and the reflexive play of Close-Up (1990). The swerve is double. Suicide, a subject the cinema of the Islamic Republic did not treat, is set at the centre with no motive, psychology or past, so that a feature runs on a request alone. And where every convention requires an answer, the fiction breaks for video of its own making. The stake was real: at Cannes the coda was mocked as well as honoured. The bar is met and no more, because the grammar was by then a proven path.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows: that a man can be close to others and alone. Shot and reverse shot inside the car keep each passenger in his own frame, side by side and never together. The long shots of the car crawling over the hills, the voices continuing at the same level, put the man in a landscape that does not notice him, and the gravel works, earth moved from one place to another, are the image of what he asks. The withheld motive is a formal choice: a reason would make the film a case and the viewer a judge. The black screen puts the viewer in the hole. Held from the top by the first reel, where form waits on content, and by a coda argued by contrast rather than formed out of what came before.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Twenty-nine years of argument are the evidence, and the questions are still open: why Badii wants to die; whether the opening approaches carry the erotic reading some critics have proposed, which the film neither confirms nor refuses; whether he wakes; what the coda is, consolation, a reminder that the film was only a film, or an image of the life he would return to. The film is a standard text in the arguments over Iranian cinema under censorship, the ethics of withholding, and reflexivity. Its rhymes yield on return: the soldier running down the hill the camera will hold at night, the hopper’s earth and the grave’s. Held a step down because the yield gathers in two questions, and sparseness leaves fewer textures to return to.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is the demonstration that a feature could be made from one request in a moving car, motive and outcome withheld and the fiction broken at the end, and that this minimum could carry a life and a death. Much of that force belongs to Close-Up and the Koker films, and it is discounted here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or made Kiarostami’s the most visible name in world art cinema at the decade’s end and fixed Iranian cinema in international attention; the car as stage passed into his own Ten (2002) and Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (2015), and the long take over landscape into the slow cinema that followed, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s among it. The reach is wide within art cinema, narrow beyond it, and shared with the director’s other films.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across twenty-nine years. The film as released survives whole, and no altered version replaces it. Presence is continuous within art cinema: the film is kept in circulation with the other winners of the Palme d’Or, taught and screened, and it is one of the two or three titles by which its director is known. It is not presence of the widest kind among art films of its years, narrower than that of In the Mood for Love (8.6). The surface does not date: dust, hills and a car are without period, and the coda’s video, which is of its moment, is part of the argument rather than a dated finish. The bar is met at the foot of what that span allows.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. Homayun Payvar’s photography holds a hard ochre light, frames the hillside road so that the car is small and the voices near, and lights the night by lightning. The sound carries the machinery of the gravel works, the wind, and voices kept at one level over long distances. The non-professionals are directed to hold the frame: Homayoun Ershadi’s still, heavy face, which never explains itself, and Abdolrahman Bagheri’s ease. Kiarostami’s own cutting makes each conversation in the car play as one. The costs: the austerity is uniform, the first reel and the seminarian’s scene are flat in pacing rather than in design, and the coda’s deliberately poor video still costs the image. Beside Chinatown (9.0) and Tokyo Story (9.3) the command is narrower and the range smaller.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dusty, quarried hill of the day and the green, crowded hillside of the coda. One law governs both: earth is moved, and a man is helped or not by those around him. By day, labourers and machines move the earth Badii wants put over him; in the coda the same hill holds soldiers at rest and a crew at work, and the man who lay in the grave smokes among them. The listeners from the margins, the longer road and the museum’s preserved dead obey the same law, that a life is chosen in relation to others. The coda keeps the law in meaning and breaks it in medium, a real fracture, and outside it the range is narrow.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 95 minutes holds. One consciousness, withheld; labour, in the day workers, the gravel works, the building site and the museum; the state, in the army, the soldier on leave, Badii’s memories of service and the soldiers of the coda; peoples, Kurd, Afghan, Azeri and Tehrani, with the war in Afghanistan behind the seminarian; the sacred, in religious law; the family, in Bagheri’s sick child and his wife; the natural order, in earth, tree, fruit, sunset and rain. One drive joins them, and none is merely listed. What holds the axis lowest: Badii’s own family and history are absent by design, the city appears only as its edges, and each order is touched through one figure in one scene. The figure describes a small form held with discipline.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.7, then The Unconcealment, The Swerve and The Imperishable at 8.5. A form that keeps each man in his own frame, side by side and never together, and withholds the motive so that the viewer cannot judge; a disclosure that the freedom to die is the condition under which a life is chosen; a subject the cinema of its country did not treat, set at the centre with no reason given and a fiction broken where it should resolve; and a film that survives whole and does not date.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: labour, the state, peoples, the sacred, the family and the natural order are joined through one drive, but Badii’s own family and history are absent, the city appears only as its edges, and each order is touched through one figure. Above it, The Sublime at 8.0, an elevation real at three points and rare by design, and The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3: approaches that run long and a slack middle, and a myth built but left skeletal.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Unconcealment at 8.5, The Swerve at 8.5 and The Imperishable at 8.5 each meet the bar of 8.5 exactly, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 99.8, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Taste of Cherry (Ta’m e guilass) as released in 1997, in its one known cut, about 95 minutes with listings giving 95 to 99, from the first approach on the edge of Tehran to the end of the video coda, which is part of the work: written, directed, produced and edited by Abbas Kiarostami, photographed by Homayun Payvar, with Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari and Mir Hossein Noori. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Persian film; English subtitles are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described. Accounts of how the film was made are not the object; only what they produce on the screen is judged. Details that could not be verified, among them the way the conversations in the car were shot, the circumstances of the film’s entry at Cannes, the recording used for the coda’s music, later restorations, the number of scenes, the share of the running time spent inside the car, the sum Badii offers and the length of the coda, are not given.