The thematic preoccupations and the style of A Taste of Cherry are concentrated into distilled form and the film is one of Kiarostami's most abstract. Peter Brooks comments on the significance of repetition on narratives of the death drive. Repetition in the text holds back its forward movement, postponing or delaying the end. He points out that the line of narrative cannot follow the straightest path from point to point without deviating from its course. 'The shortest distance between beginning and end would be the collapse of one into the other, of life into immediate death.' The narrative from into which the principle of delay translates may vary significantly, built around, for instance, an aesthetic of suspense, or, at a further extreme, the intrusion of digression or the 'aleatory strolls' that Gilles Deleuze associates with the loosening of the movement image, as, for instance, in Rossellini's Journey to Italy. In Kiarostami's cinema, an aesthetic of digression leads towards an aesthetic of reality, not in a simple opposition to fiction, but towards ways in which the cinema acknowledges the limitations of representation. In the Koker trilogy, shot between 1987 and 1994, Kiarostami twice went back over a previous work and attempted to mobilize a cinema of observation that would follow absences in representation that are usually displaced by the needs of an externally determined system of ordering, such as narrational coherence. 


 Filmed in 1996, in the immediate aftermath of the centenary of cinema, the film's [A Taste of Cherry] drive towards death has an allegorical dimension in which Mr Baidei's quest acts also as an elegiac reflection on the dying moments of cinema. If there is a question of a lost love behind the protagonist's desire for death, it might well be reconfigured as the director's own sense of loss at the death of his own great love, the cinema. The 'coda' offers a possible resurrection and return, phoenix-like, from the ashes with the possibility of a more intense engagement with his society and its problems. But the sound of 'St James' Infirmary' on the soundtrack dramatizes a dead love and Kiarostami himself announces that the filming is over. 

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Abbas Kiarostami: Cinema of Uncertainty, Cinema of Delay | Death 24x a Second : Stillness and the Moving Image | Laura Mulvey