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Like all of Abbas Kiarostami's films, Ten is simple. It's just ten conversations that take place in a car between a woman and her various passengers. Four involve her son, two her sister, and four are with women that the driver picks up along the way. The movie's simplicity has fooled some reviewers into thinking it's superficial or banal, but it's neither. It's a rich portrait of an Iranian woman at a particular place in her life.

That place is as a mother who's divorced her husband and remarried. Her son, Amin, from her first marriage is still bitter about it and, as we learn in the first conversation, threatens to go live with his father. This first conversation is the longest of the film--almost fifteen minutes--and establishes both the relationship between mother and son as well as important details about who she is. She has a thriving profession (we learn later as a photographer), she wants more from life than women usually get in modern-day Iran, and she loves her son though she tries to badger him into accepting his new stepfather. What she doesn't realize, but we do, is that her constant harping on the subject is driving the boy farther away. And as the conversation ends, she admits to the boy's accusation that she lied at the divorce proceedings; she accused his father of a drug addiction, the only way she'd be allowed to divorce. It's an extraordinary moment, and one made even more powerful because we haven't seen the woman yet. We've only heard her, and we're forced to judge her by her voice.

We do get to see the woman in the next conversation, and I, at least, was surprised by what I saw. She's a sophisticated, beautiful, fashionably-dressed woman with trendy sunglasses and flattering makeup. In retrospect, I'm not sure why I was surprised, but I was. In those first fifteen minutes, I had conjured a vision of her as a plain, put-upon Iranian woman like I've seen in so many other films. Kiarostami confronts that view by not letting us see her until we've learned something about her, then pulls the rug out on our superficial assumption.

Not that all the women in Ten are beautiful and sophisticated. In fact, the driver's sister is the next person we see, and she's more stereotypically Iranian: soft-spoken, plainly dressed with no makeup and her headdress pulled tightly around her face. But she's no wallflower. She chastises the driver for how her son behaves around the family and suggests that maybe Amin needs his father more than his mother right now. The mother reluctantly agrees, as we find out in a later conversation with the boy.

The other passengers in our tale are all relative strangers to whom the driver offers rides. There's an old woman who goes to pray at a mausoleum three times a day. There's a prostitute who cackles at the driver's discomfort with her profession. And then there's a woman about the driver's age who's also gone to the mausoleum. She's praying that the man she loves will soon propose marriage. It's fascinating to see how the driver interacts with each of these women. To her sister, she's bossy and even mean in one conversation. With the old woman, she's respectful but bemused at someone who'd walk a long ways three times a day to pray. And in a beautiful nighttime scene, her attempt to understand and possibly confront the prostitute ends with the only shot outside of the car. We watch the prostitute get into another stranger's car.

The film is both a fascinating portrait of an Iranian woman and her milieu but also a provocative formal experiment. Ten is filmed with just two digital cameras, both mounted on the dashboard of the woman's car. One camera faces the passenger's seat, one faces the driver's seat. This highlights Kiarostami's extraordinary editing. Watching a movie with only two camera positions, you'd be forgiven for thinking the film would be dull and monotonous. But instead the limiting of choices makes Ten that much more interesting. We notice how Kiarostami cuts between the two conversants much more in some scenes than others. Typically, a conversation that focuses on only one person implies a lack of equality, while cutting between the two characters reveals their similarities or at least their symmetry.

The editing also works to build tension. There's something terrifically provocative about watching a conversation where you can't see one of the participants. You start to imagine what she's like or what her history is. As the conversation continues, sometimes you get to see her but sometimes not. We're reminded of how many people in society go unseen, their problems unnoticed by the world at large.

Kiarostami also builds tension through the formal device of ten different conversations. We look forward to seeing a familiar character, and we wonder how his or her life has changed in the intervening time. Ten is
slippery where time is concerned. At first, only a day or two seems to have passed, but a clue in a conversation alerts us that maybe months have gone by. The people look the same, but their lives are not. This reaches its apex in my favorite conversation, the ninth. There we see the woman who had been praying for a marriage proposal. I won't spoil the outcome, but it's a powerfully moving moment that highlights Kiarostami's themes of women, marriage, time, and relationships.

Like most of Kiarostami's movies, the end comes just a little sooner than you expect. That dovetails nicely with the formal breaks between the conversations. Kiarostami starts each one with a number, but the numbers count backwards from ten. That and the circular motif on the screen echo how old movies used to countdown from ten before they started. It's as if all of these conversations are merely an introduction to a movie. When Ten ends, when we reach the number zero, when the screen goes dark, that's when the real movie begins. Which brings us back to Kiarostami's recurring theme of reality. What is reality? What is a movie? Is Ten a documentary, a fiction film or something in between? Neither the movie nor the press notes make it clear, but it doesn't really matter. As the movie shows over and over again, it's life. And life goes on.   

J. Robert Parks 4/9/2003