Ten
Dir: Abbas Kiarostami 2002 Iran/France 1hr 33mins
In Farsi with English subtitles

Abbas Kiarostami is one of the foremost and highly influential Directors to emerge from post-revolution Iran. His films have not only found international acclaim but also introduced Western audiences to an alien culture in such a way that gave Iranians a humane and artistic face at a time when there was much negative sentiment towards Iran and its people. Like many Directors, he began by making a series of short films. His first, Bread and Alley (Nan-O Kuche) was made in 1970 when Kiarostami was 27 years old. Some 19 short films followed over the succeeding decade. He did, however, release his first true feature film in 1977 - Report. After Report, Kiarostami returned to making shorts and then developed into documentaries. The 1987 feature, Where Is The Friends House was well received but it was not until the 1990 release of Close Up and the 1992 And Life Goes On that a wider audience was achieved. Since then he has made a number of highly acclaimed films including Through The Olive Trees, A Taste Of Cherry and The Winds Will Carry Us. In 1997 he was awarded the UNESCO Fellini Medal in Gold for his achievements in film, freedom, peace and tolerance.

For Ten, Kiarostami used non-actors and allowed them to tell their own stories. This gives us first hand insight into the lives of the people depicted. The boundary between fact and fiction hardly exists as it is difficult to imagine what is happening outside the car was planned or scripted. It's impossible to clearly define the border between the film - i.e. the written, directed, rehearsed and edited material under Kiarostami's control - and the reality of the traffic-choked streets through which the driver expertly negotiates: are the other road-users with whom she interacts paid performers or actual Tehran residents? "Go, sister, go!" shouts a passer-by at one stage.

We are witness to 10 car journeys, all of which involve a young unnamed Iranian woman, played by Mania Akbari, a passenger and a conversation. The digital cameras were mounted on the dashboard of the car and virtually throughout the film the focus is on the passenger seat, with occasional cuts to the driver. This is the extent of the direction. Kiarostami has allowed almost complete freedom to the participants and what we see is simply a record of what took place. There are no complex camera moves and very little else that would get in the way of what is being said - like Tape, this is a film that relies on dialogue for its impact.

The film is emotionally honest and the pieces add together to give us an unrivalled insight into the life of women in contemporary Iran. The process could have created a product that was staid and static, yet what we get is a film that absorbs our attention and provides compelling viewing - a road movie the likes of which you have never seen!

Peter Bradshaw, Friday September 27, 2002; The Guardian: [Read Full Review Here]

Recently I found myself talking to a prominent executive in the British film world. We were discussing the difficulties involved, many of them self-created, in getting non-Hollywood, arthouse pictures seen in this country. He complained that many in the industry simply assumed that ordinary people don't want to see that sort of thing - but were these "ordinary people" given enough of a choice in the first place? So he proposed the Tate Modern theory of cinema distribution. Tate Modern has some of the most bewilderingly difficult art in the world. It doesn't need to fill the walls with Gainsborough and Constable, or even Warhol and Lichtenstein, to get the turnstiles clanging. On the contrary: people of all ages and backgrounds flood in there every day, often travelling great distances for the challenging pleasure of what they're going to see. Can't the cinema business take a leaf out of that book?

Emboldened, I suggested he throw his corporate muscle behind Abbas Kiarostami's brilliant, radically minimal new film Ten. At this thought, sadly, the executive flinched as if someone had presented him a large tax bill while simultaneously hitting him over the head with a frying pan. So for some people, this movie is still too difficult. I can only say that it is a very remarkable film, one of the very best of the year - remarkable for its strenuous technical simplicity, for its superbly intelligent acting and for the extraordinary, almost unmediated access it appears to give to the lives and thoughts of real, modern women in Iran.

Ten is shot almost entirely with two fixed digital video cameras trained on the driver and passenger seat of a moving car. It is a film which presents itself with as little cinematic fuss as an episode of TV's Marion and Geoff. Certainly it has much less obvious impact than a film with a similar driver-passenger theme: Kiarostami's Palme d'Or-winning Taste of Cherry. This has the similar sense of intimacy on the move, exploiting the car's singular potential as a partly private, partly public place. But Ten has something Taste of Cherry didn't: a kind of "what just happened?" feeling that only hits you afterwards. It's a sense that you have witnessed something profoundly important happen in someone's life, without any close-ups or stirring music to help you realise it.

The film is structured around 10 conversations which happen over an approximate 48-hour period, separated with a deceptively jaunty countdown motif and a little bell. A beautiful woman (Mania Akbari) in a loose veil and stylish sunglasses is at the wheel, heading for the bakery to pick up a cake for her second husband's 39th birthday. Some of her passengers, relatives and friends, appear in shot. But the strangers to whom she gives lifts, an old woman, then a prostitute, do not. With her son, a belligerent and wilful little boy, she argues constantly. He can't forgive her for making up a story about his father's alleged drug use to get a divorce; she tries to explain that these mendacities are forced on women if they wish to be free. But her boy isn't having any of it and it's crystal clear that, in the battle of the sexes, he is emphatically in training for the man's part - partly armed with what is, after all, a miscarriage of justice.

With other passengers, women friends, she discusses love. These women have the very western problem of commitmentphobic men, but they are entirely without the western woman's rights and privileges to fall back on in their loneliness. "We women are unhappy; we don't know how to love ourselves," she tells one bitterly sobbing companion. She picks up others, a pious old lady who prays three times a day and has given away her considerable wealth, and a prostitute who claims the driver's new husband sounds no different from the others who cheat on their wives with her. Kiarostami's characteristic mannerism of showing just one side of a conversation, ignoring the convention of cutting back and forth between speakers, is as startling and perplexing as ever. But in this way his off-camera voices become disturbing commentaries, almost as if they are coming from the driver's own mind.

Kiarostami's key scene arrives when a friend of the driver, a woman who has been callously abandoned by her man, tearfully pulls back her veil to reveal that she has shaved her head. This is an ingenious creative use of the Iranian censorship rule that no woman is allowed to remove her veil and show her hair on camera, and a unique moment of directorial intervention in a film from which the director has, in the normal sense, almost entirely absented himself. Perhaps out of embarrassment, the driver says that her shaven head suits her, and it is shocking and moving to realise that, intentionally or not, she is right. In her anger, her asceticism, her despair, the woman has become beautiful. The driver herself, despite the romantic luxury of a second, evidently solvent husband, suffers her own grievous defeat. She cedes custody of her boy to her first partner and gives up arguing with the gloatingly triumphant son, as he ferociously denounces her shortcomings as a mother.

Well, there's no doubt that this movie is, as the network executives say, a tough watch. But it repays the investment of attention a thousandfold. With its imperceptible blend of actors, newcomers and non-professionals, and a happy mix of guided and unguided improvisations, it's a compelling realist document: challenging cinema conceived at the highest pitch of intelligence.

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