Passed over for cinema release here - even though it shared the Palme d'Or for best film at Cannes in 1997 - this turgid Iranian opus directed by Abbas Kiarostami is a three-act movie in which the middle-aged Mr Badii (Homayon Ershadi) drives round and round Teheran in search of somebody to throw earth on his body after his planned suicide by sleeping pills.
In the first act he meets a young soldier from Kurdistan and asks him a series of banal questions as they drive around the city. When the young soldier runs away, Badii rounds up an Afghan seminarian for another meaningless exchange and more and more driving around.
In the third act he meets an older man, a Turkish taxidermist who tells Badii that he himself attempted suicide once. He recalls hanging his noose from a tree when he felt the soft flesh of a fruit; he ate the fruit and then another and then the sun came up and he rediscovered the meaning of life.
The message of A Taste of Cherry is clearly intended as life-affirming and to encourage positive thinking, but it registers as merely facile and obvious in a film that exerts the fascination of watching paint dry.
Hotel De Love (15)
Aden Young, one of Australia's most intense young actors, lightens up in first-time director Craig Rosenberg's briskly paced and often very funny romantic comedy, which goes directly to video in this country. Set for the most part in an outlandishly-designed love-themed hotel, the movie oozes with that cheery quirkiness so characteristic of Australian comedy as it follows the fortunes of twin brothers (played by Aden Young and Simon Bossell) besotted since their teens with a young woman played by Saffron Burrows from Circle Of Friends.
Touch (15)
Paul Schrader's uneven yet diverting comedy-thriller, based on an Elmore Leonard story, features Skeet Ulrich as a young man whose apparently miraculous healing powers attract the attention of opportunists, fanatics and hustlers. Sharing in the script's sparkling repartee are Christopher Walken, Bridget Fonda, Tom Arnold, Gina Gershon and Janeane Garofalo.
