Looking back, I have even more admiration for what Kiarostami did next. He could have made another wry, humanistic, self-reflexive film like “Through the Olive Trees” and boosted his popularity even further among festival mavens. But when I saw him in Tehran in early ’97, I could sense he was after something radically different. He seemed very pressured and it was said the government was making his working conditions rough. Not long after, we learned why: his new film was about suicide, which is taboo under Islam. The battle over whether the film (which he reportedly modified with a new, more lyrical ending) would be permitted to go to Cannes reached the very top levels of the Iranian government, and lasted until the last minute. When I got on the plane for Cannes (after writing a report for Variety that was used to bolster Kiasotami’s position in Iran), it was still unclear whether the film would be released.

What followed was, of course, a famously dramatic piece of cinema history: “Taste of Cherry,” a very bleak but also mysterious film about an apparently well-off man’s spiral toward self-erasure, swept into Cannes and became the first Iranian film to win the Palme d’or. Yet while it drew hosannahs from the French especially, it was not universally loved by critics. The post-screening debate between Roger Ebert (con) and Jonathan Rosenbaum and Dave Kehr (pro) remains part of the film’s lore.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t participate in any of those discussions for a simple reason: I didn’t entirely know what to make of “Taste of Cherry,” to begin with. And this marked a turning point in my relationship with the director’s work. Before, having been writing about his films and studying them for several years, I felt like I knew what he was about as an artist. But beginning with “Taste of Cherry,” each new film confounded my expectations. It took days, weeks, months or even years to process and finally get a fix on the latest Kiarostami, to feel I had a grasp on what it was about that at least satisfied me. “Close-Up” was multi-layered in its meanings, but I felt I got it on first look. “Taste of Cherry” and “The Wind Will Carry Us” (2000), on the other hand, I came to regard as masterworks equal to that film, but on initial viewings they befuddled me—and demanded that I revamp my understanding of Kiarostami yet again.

For critics, who are increasingly pressed to deliver cogent judgments within an hour or two of seeing a film, such bafflements are as valuable as they are awkward. What if the greatest artists ultimately are the ones who require time, patience, thought, and perhaps above all, an awareness that views their work as an organically evolving whole rather than one consumerist nugget after another? That’s certainly one way of describing Kiarostami’s greatness. He was an artist who never rested in whatever parameters were used to define him, but kept on challenging himself, pushing the boundaries that the world, the authorities, critics, admirers and even he himself had set around him.