Ten
With Mania Akbari, Amin Maher, Kamran Adl.
Iran/France, 2002, 35mm, color, 94 min.
Farsi with English subtitles.
Kiarostami’s most recent film offers an extraordinarily revealing look at the condition of women in present-day Iran. Ten (much as Taste of Cherry before it) is set entirely within the confines of a moving car—a private “road movie” in which speech is unrestrained behind closed doors. The story follows the divorced mother of a seven-year-old boy over the course of several days as she chauffeurs her son, her sister, a pious elderly women, a streetwalker, and others on various errands around town. Each trip becomes a conversation that touches on the characters’ emotional lives and, no less intriguingly, on the social realities of life in contemporary Tehran. The woman’s annoyance at all the bad drivers around her provides a lightly comic counterpoint to which Western audiences will easily relate.