Ten is not Abbas Kiarostami's best film. But it sure is a good film that plays with the form of documentary to create a sudued piece of fiction. The film is divided into - surprise! - ten sequences. In each one of them, we follow the same female driver along with the passenger she happens to have in her car; sometimes it's a woman she has given a lift, and sometimes it's her little Emperor-ish son. If you have any preconceptions about Iranian life, some of them will be shattered by this movie. The women portrayed in the movie do not comprise one homogenous group. Rather, they embody different attitudes towards society, men, what it is like to be a woman. The opening scene is perfectly chosen. The driver has a verbal fight with her son. He accuses her of everything, and she defends herself by critiquing her former husband, and society. The camera rarely (never?) moves from the boy's agitated body language. It's an emotionally poignant seene that creates a kind of suffocating effect, in a good way.
As a viewer, I feel trapped in the car along with these people. The minimalist idea of the film is well executed. I barely think about not seeing anything in the entire movie except the front seat of a car. The makes us strangely aware of the connection between what we hear and what we see. In many scenes, we only see one of the interlocutors, and we can only imagine what the other looks like when she talks. Of course, you might give this a political interpretation.
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