Ten By Peter Tonguette Peter Tonguette was Staff Critic for The Film Journal from 2002 to 2005.  His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Contracampo, and 24fps Magazine.

"Lower the window. Let some air in."
--First dialogue spoken in Ten

Abbas Kiarostami's magisterial new film Ten takes place entirely within the confines of a single automobile over the course of unspecified days or weeks. Except for a single shot late in the picture, all of the action is documented by two alternating, motionless camera angles: one is focused on the driver's seat, the other on the passenger's seat. The driver is a single, divorced mother who looks like she's in her 30s and her passengers include her eight-year-old son, friends and family, and assorted strangers she gives rides to, such as en elderly woman and, later, a prostitute. Based on this summary, readers familiar with Kiarostami's body of work may recall his earlier picture Taste of Cherry (1997), in which significant portions of the action were restriced to the protagonist's car. But Taste of Cherry allowed the audience breathers--in other words, not all of the scenes were set inside the car-- while Ten is relentless, wearing in the consistency of its formal design.

But it's important to remember that the spatial confinement of Ten is necessarily uncomfortable and claustrophobic. It is reflexive of a society (contemporary Iran, the locale of Kiarostami's fiction features to date have been set) where freedom and honest discourse have been driven indoors, as if under attack. Except for the central character's eight-year-old son, all of the cast is female. The car acts as a sort of tiny oasis for Iran's permanent second class. Kiarostami relays these truths in the strongest cinematic terms he can, and the results are trying and also unexpectedly exhilarating.

The film's lack of visual punctuation and directorial "interference" must also be read in context with Kiarostami's concerns of late. Steve Erickson was the first critic I'm familiar with who linked Ten with The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), Kiarostami's previous fictional feature and his most pessimistic examination into the ethics of filmmaking. In hindsight, it also seems to represent the end of an era in Kiarostami's filmmaking, for in Ten he seems to have concluded that the only way a filmmaker can ethically interact with the people he or she is filming is at a great distance. As a few writers have noted, Ten, in fact, may stand as one of the few feature
films ever made where it is almost assurred that the director was never on the "set" during filming. The imposition of Kiarostami's will on the material seems limited to the editing of the hours of largely improvised raw footage he filmed, a credit he shares with seven others. It will be fascinating to see how (or if) Kiarostami will push this philosophy of filmmaking even further in his next films.

The most powerful sections in the film are the four between mother (played by the radiant Mania Akbari) and son. The son, transparently under the influence of his father, becomes more defiant and set in his ways with each episode, calling his mother unfit, too preoccupied in her work and own life, and not mindful of the "responsibilities" of home. In the most intimate terms, Kiarostami casts light on age old tensions between woman and man in Iran and uncovers their origin in the values learned in childhood. The mother argues back at times, reasonably states her case in others, but is more often just motherly, acting with the same deference and calmness that any mother would to an argumenative child. The difference is that in a Western film the arguments would most likely be over relatively trivial matters--a Steven Spielberg vision of suburban chaos--but here the spats between parent and child skirt shadily around fundamental issues of human rights.

And yet Ten insists on regarding its characters as characters, not as mere symbols for social problems.. Paradoxically, a film deeply and overtly concerned with women’s rights in Iran such as Jafar Panahi’s The Circle (2000) has less resonance than Ten because its characters are more abstracted. Kiarostami maintains a human dimension throughout Ten and, in this humanness, the plight of the women of Iran couldn’t be more clear or open to empathy. It is a similar tactic to the one he deployed--and was criticized for in some corners--in his documentary about the Ugandan AIDS crisis, A.B.C. Africa (2001), choosing to show children suffering from AIDS laughing and dancing--and simply being children--instead of excessively focusing on the specific anguish of their plight.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002