Review of Kiarostami's Ten

This was the first film I've watched by Kiarostami. I had learned about Iranian Cinema from Mark Cousins' The Story of Film which is great, probably the best documentary about the history of Cinema I've ever seen. It talked about Iranian Cinema's adherence to traditional film and how, even in the face of Islamic restrictions, Iranian filmmakers were making high quality films. Ten is no exception. It shows Iranian society in flux, perhaps, even in crisis.

The film revolves around a woman who has recently divorced and remarried. The film is dialogue driven. The entire film takes place in the woman's car. She drives around Tehran talking to her son about the divorce, to her friends about their love lifes, and to a prostitute. These conversations bring out Iranians lives. For a country that is repressed and strictly controlled, Ten reveals Iranians living life through divorce, through bratty kids, and social change. At times, especially the scene with the prostitute I was, not shocked, but jarred by the frankness and utter humanism of the dialogue of the film. With the exception of the little boy, the rest of the characters are women. In the discussion between the woman and her son we get a clear picture of the way Iranian women are treated. She is totally deferential to her son. Perhaps she is afraid she will lose him to her former husband, perhaps it is because she cannot stand up to a male, even a ten year old boy.

The women in the film all wear headscarves. They wear little to no makeup. Yet, they speak candidly about their lives, specifically about their relations with men. It is this insight into the life of an Iranian woman which makes the film so good. To learn what they think about divorce, about how they relate to men in Iran takes away some concealment of an Iranian woman's life. In the West we are often shown how women in the Middle East are badly mistreated. Ten reveals a deeper, humanistic portrait of an Iranian woman's struggle to get a divorce, raise a child, and help her friends. She does drive a car, she is independent, so she has attained some level of liberation from the patriarchal Iranian society.

I learned about this movie from Nicholas Rombes' book Cinema in the Digital Age. I had heard about Kiarostami previously from his other movies. The book writes about how Kiarostami used a "nondirected' technique to make the film. In the film he just attached two simple cameras to the dashboard of the car. The cameras are the only angle from which we see the actors; the boy, the woman, the woman's friends, the prostitute, they are all presented from the same angle. At times I thought it was like Taxi Cab confessions. I don't know which came first, but they are similar. It gives the film a very different perspective. The camera doesn't move. It is stationary. It creates a very simple style. At times I was a little bored. Yet, the dialogue kept me attentive.

Kiarostami has been hailed as a great auteur. I'm looking forward to watching more of his films.