In the same way that actors refer to Macbeth as "The Scottish Play" to avoid the taboo of mentioning the title, I like to refer to this as "The Iranian Film". It's a movie of such unparalleled tedium that to pronounce its name may drive people to enter a monastic order in search of stimulus. It is not merely like watching paint dry. It is like watching beige paint attempting to dry in a humidor in a Barratt Home.<br /><br />Astonishingly, A Taste of Cherry (as it translates) won the Palm D'Or at Cannes. It was a decision motivated by politics and pseudery that exemplifies the worst Cannes jury decisions. ("Zut alors. Zis film, it was made in Iran." "Mon dieu, what's it like?" "Well, it's quite boring, but it could be the start of a Middle Eastern renaissance.")<br /><br />This, sadly, is where the astonishment ends. Critics have fawned over it for its simplicity, but the 95 minutes is a vacuum of Proustian proportions and was, for me, substantially less stimulating than watching the back of the head of the man sat in front of me at the cinema. No one can argue that this film is not boring. It's possible to contend that boredom was Abbas Kiarostami's intention. But the crux of the matter is this: it didn't need to be dull. Tedium is not a vital context for the story, and as such is an insult to the audience.<br /><br />The plot - a parable depicting a man's quest to find someone who will bury him after he commits suicide - moves with glacial speed. Each candidate explains at length the metaphysical problems with being complicit in such an act, but the monologues are no more sophisticated (and a great deal less articulate) than a pub conversation with a clutch of philosophy students. The Iranian setting gives some insight into Islamic culture, but the whole enterprise is undermined by the way it is filmed.<br /><br />At the beginning of most of the shots, you see the main character's jeep trundling from one side of the screen to the other. "Nothing interesting is happening now," you think to yourself as the protagonist explains yet again what he wants his passenger to do, "but perhaps we will reach a dramatic moment at the end of the shot." The jeep duly reaches the end of the frame, only for the film to cut to a near-identical shot of the same jeep crossing the same drab and dusty landscape with the same uneventful monologue.<br /><br />Even if you strip away the boredom, there is precious little underneath unless you engage in the most polo-necked type of film criticism. I have read one review that claimed that the protagonist's stone-faced performance was "showing by concealing". Another suggested that the failure to explain the character's motivation for killing himself made him an "everyman". There is, I suggest, an element of the emperor's new clothes about this.<br /><br />A Taste of Cherry deals with metaphysics, but that does not make it profound. Viewers who can sit through it are open minded, but that does not make them intellectual. Don't go and see this on the say-so of an impressionable pseud. Don't go and see it at all.