Ten movie review & film summary (2003)

Kiarostami's method, I learn from Geoff Andrew's review in the British magazine Sight & Sound, was to audition real people, choose his actors, talk at length with them about their characters and dialogue, and then send them out in the car without him, to play their characters (or perhaps themselves) as they drove the streets and the camera watched. Beginning with 23 hours of footage, he ended with this 94-minute film.

Now you might agree that is a provocative and original way to make a movie. Then I might tell you that "A Taste of Cherry" was also set entirely in the front seat of a car--only in that film Kiarostami held the camera and sat alternatively in the seat of the driver and the passenger. And that "The Wind Will Carry Us" was about a man driving around trying to find a place where his cell phone would work. You might observe that his method has become more daring, but you would still be left with movies about people driving and talking.

Ah, but what do we learn about them, and about modern Iran? Andrew, who thinks this is Kiarostami's best film, observes the woman complaining about Iran's "stupid laws" that forbid divorce unless she charges her husband with abuse or drug addiction. He observes that the movie shows prostitution exists in Iran, even though it is illegal. The old woman argues that the driver should try prayer, and she does, showing the nation's religious undercurrent. The friend removes her scarf to show that she has shaved her head, and this is transgressive because women are not allowed to bare their heads in public. And little Amin, the son, seems like a repressive Iranian male in training, having internalized the license of a male-dominant society to criticize and mock his mother.

All very well. But to praise the film for this is like praising a child for coloring between the lines. Where is the reach, the desire to communicate, the passion? If you want to see the themes in "Ten" explored with power and frankness in films of real power, you would turn away from Kiarostami's arid formalism and look instead at a film like Tahmineh Milani's "Two Women" (1999) or Jafar Panahi's "The Circle" (2000), which have the power to deeply move audiences, instead of a willingness to alienate or bore them.