Disney and Abbas Kiarostami, two great tastes that taste great together

Disney's Haunted Mansion
Taste of Cherry, dir. Abbas Kiarostami

Taste of Cherry is about a taxi driver who is contemplating suicide. He has encounters with several people throughout the day, in which he attempts to recruit a volunteer to see if he is alive after his potential attempt, or, if he has decided to kill himself, to shovel some dirt on his body. The first, a solider, is too scared to do it. The second, a cleric, refuses for religious reasons. The third, once suicidal himself, accepts the task and tries, lightly, to talk the taxi driver out of it. Then it's night, the taxi driver is in his potential graver, it starts to rain, it cuts to black... and then the film switches to videotape footage of the shooting of the movie. It's a meta comment on the filming process, blah blah blah, it intentionally does not resolve the plot, blah blah blah. If you've seen one metafictive discussion you've seen them all.

At Disney, we went on the Haunted Mansion ride. Someone kept getting up out of the car, and the ride was stopped three times. Each stoppage had an in-character request from a voice to sit back down, followed by a blown-out speaker with a cast member not even attempting to stay in character telling everyone the ride would resume when everyone was seated. The ride itself was fine, even very well done, but the constant interruptions ruined whatever small chance it had of feeling immersive and thus, even for a moment, real.

And that provided me the critical perspective I needed for Taste of Cherry. The movie is ostensibly about whether to kill oneself or not, a common enough trope in romantic and existentialist literature. The third person the taxi driver talks to does some work at softening his resolve to commit suicide by pointing out some of the nice things about the world, but I do think the metafictive ending is key: a few people who are good at pretending, some careful work by director and crew, and most importantly the brain of the person watching it, all combine to make something real and moving and meaningful out of the fakest of things: that's the real magic, that's the thing life gives you, that's something that can never be replicated.