See also this short story about the film in The New Yorker.
The film’s spare narrative has the opaque, insinuating allure of allegory, or veiled confession. That, during filming, Kiarostami himself occupied the off-camera seat in every conversation we see, suggests the filmmaker revisiting his own struggles with inner darkness.
— Godfrey Cheshire (Criterion)
Each of their positions—soldier, seminarian, museum employee—represents a pillar of society, yet each of them is an ethnic outsider: a Kurd, an Afghan, and a Turk, respectively. It’s canny how Kiarostami indicates the ways in which a person can be bound up in the social fabric and still stand apart from it, but the disparity between Mr. Badii and his interlocutors is also economic: Though he speaks of friendship and receiving the gift of assistance, his primary persuader remains a large sum of money.[…]
The older man promises to take him along “a longer road, but better and more beautiful.” It’s hard not to see this as a touching metaphor for life itself. The vehicle soon passes from harsh earthen wasteland to lovely rolling hills spotted with trees in bloom.
— Budd Wilkins (Slant Magazine)
In focusing on Sabzian, Kiarostami saw something that hadn’t yet been identified in cinema: the exact point where, if for only a moment, the movies and real life dissolve into each other, before detaching again, as mirror images.
Kiarostami shot each actor separately and edited the footage together in shot/reverse-shot form to create the illusion of passengers sitting across from Badii. In truth, Kiarostami himself sat across from the actor. Additionally, none of the actors except Bagheri [the taxidermist] and Ershadi [the protagonist] met each other. The result of these tactics is a palpable increase in the passengers' level of uncertainty.[…]
Kiarostami evokes the force of this loneliness by isolating each actor in a closeup. It's an indication of Bagheri's compassion that he and Badii [the protagonist's character] are allowed to appear in the same shot.
— Steve Erickson (Film Quarterly)
Is Taste of Cherry a worthwhile viewing experience? I say it is not.
Synopsis: A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.