So like a year ago, well before I started in on this project, I decided I wanted to watch an Iranian movie, and I chose Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry because I didn’t want to watch “some weird meta-fictional quasi-documentary about a news story from 25 years ago that is supposed to be all deceptive and confusing.” And yet, here I am anyway!

So here is the background: Some rando in Iran conned this family into thinking he was famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. And a newspaper writer found out about it, and got the police to come bust this guy and wrote it up in his paper. The article attracted the notice of famous-er Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who then set out to make a quasi-documentary about it.

So this mixes real courtroom footage (which seems semi-unreal and meta because the defendant is super-articulate and gives this big speech about how he loves films so much, and Makhmalbaf’s films speak to his powerlessness, and how by pretending to be Makhmalbaf he was able to feel important and respected) with re-enactments of various events, acted by the actual people involved in the case.

And after the guy gets out of jail (a relatively mild month or so), he’s greeted by the actual Makhmalbaf and rides with him on a motorcycle (with no helmets, augh) to the house of the victim family, where he begs their forgiveness with a potted flower.

And so obviously, the whole movie is an exercise in blurring the line between the real and the cinematic, both in subject and execution, leaving you to question what’s real and what’s not, and even how real the real parts are (is that courtroom defense real, or — as one of the plaintiffs argues — just the pretender playing another part?; would the victim family have been so forgiving if they weren’t on camera in this documentary?). But leaving all that aside, it’s an interesting portrait of a petty con man who barely commits any crime at all, and the kinda-sad victims who were eager to believe him to make their own lives a bit more interesting.