SCREENING LOG - 9/30-10/06, 2002

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Ten (2002, Abbas Kiarostami)

The movie lived up to my expectations without quite surpassing them. But this is coming from a guy who considers Abbas Kiarostami to be possibly the greatest director working today, so I have high expectations coming into any of his works. Paradoxically, I consider this film to be both minor-key Kiarostami, and yet it is also one of the most ambitious things he's ever done -- he's really taken the limits of "realism", fiction vs. documentary and what constitutes a story to an even more literal and demanding extreme than TASTE OF CHERRY or THE WIND WILL CARRY US.

The film takes place entirely inside a car as it is being driven by an Iranian woman through the streets of Tehran. The entire film is pretty much shot from two stationary cameras: one fixed on the lady driver, the other on her passengers. There are ten scenes in this movie, each one with the driver talking to one of her passengers as they are driving. Nearly half of the scenes are her talking to her son, who is bitterly resentful at her divorcing his father and marrying another man. Apparently she had lied in court that her ex-husband was a drug addict; such accusations of criminal behavior are the only way for a woman in Iran to attain a divorce from her husband. All the woman wants is to be happy, but the 7 year old son, in one of the most amazing child "performances" I've ever seen (I use the quotes because I'm still unsure how much of this is documentary and how much of it is made up), berates and verbally abuses his mother without mercy. It's fascinating, because by looking at the boy, you can practically see how the father must have treated her. However, the mother is no saint either -- she is clearly a needy and intense personality, and sometimes it's hard to distinguish her actions as that of self-preservation, rather than merely self-interest. But this is kind of uncertainty is emblematic of the multi-dimensional rendering of characters that Kiarostami is great at, through the use of a deceptively simple technique that somehow captures human qualities that the brains of most screenwriters could never conceive while sitting at their desks. Leave it to Abbas Kiarostami to make one of the finest films ever about the topic of divorce, especially its effects on both parent and child.

These scenes with the boy are interspersed with scenes of the driver talking to other women: her sister; an old lady who needs a lift to the mosque; a young lady who gets driven home from the mosque; a prostitute (whose face is never shown on camera, but who has an unforgettable laugh); and a friend whose husband just left her. Not all of these scenes worked for me, some fell into the banality one would expect from such a setup, but others were simply amazing; the nighttime ride with the prostitute and the grieving friend are thrilling (even though they seem a bit conceptually arch). But the real showstopper is when the young lady takes off her headscarf and shows that she has shaved off her head after she broke up with her boyfriend. This is an amazing moment of womanly self-determination and utter beauty; her face, without any hair, is stunning, and her shy way of acknowledging her act is truly moving and dignified. Moreover, this is Kiarostami's way of getting around one of the Iranian censorship laws: women are not allowed to show their hair in Iranian movies. Kiarostami takes this restriction and turns it into the inspiration for one of the most beautiful cinematic moments of the year.

I hope that this film gets distributed; I especially hope that the lady colleagues of this thread get to see this film, so I can gain from their responses. This is the first movie Kiarostami has directed with mostly female characters (he's been criticized for this in the past, but he's always maintained that the Iranian censorship laws make it impossible for him to make movies about women in a meaningful way). I don't think it's his best or most consistent work, but it's great to see a contemporary master continue to push the envelope of cinema, both in his homeland and around the world.

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