10 Conversations About Many Things

Any shorthand description of Abbas Kiarostami's latest movie 10, which began its two-week run at Film Forum last Wednesday, must begin with the work's conceptual hook. Set solely within the enclosed space of a car passing through the streets of modern Tehran, the film consists of 10 sequences recorded by two stationary dashboard-mounted digital cameras. In these sequences, all of which are conversations between driver and passenger, one can count on Kiarostami smudging the boundary between documentary and fiction in his characteristic fashion. What one won't find are any of the long shots of rural Iranian landscapes that gave such transporting beauty to his work in the previous decade.

The opening sequence introduces us to Amin (Amin Maher), a boy roughly 10 years old, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, who hops into the car's passenger seat. We soon discover that his chauffeur to the pool on this sunny day is his mother, a beautiful divorcée (Mania Akbari) in her 30s, unnamed and striking in her make-up, white headscarf, sunglasses, and jewelry. The rest of the film's scenes involve the woman and her current passenger, either her son, who appears four times, or another woman--her sister, a pious elderly woman on her way to a mausoleum, a prostitute at night, a young woman abandoned by her husband, or a gaunt young woman saddened by her crumbling engagement.

Conversations throughout the movie's 10 episodes center upon matters of family life, religion, sex, and day-to-day errands. It is a film of almost wall-to-wall speech, which transforms any interval of extended quiet (not silence, as traffic noise always remains) into a privileged, charged moment. The characters' exchanges, their tones shifting from berating to piercing to taunting to curious to soothing, are marshaled by Kiarostami through his careful handling of off-screen sound and space. In addition to being by far his most prolix film, 10 also marks Kiarostami's late arrival at the subject of Iranian women. Indeed, men are entirely absent except for Amin's father, who is merely glimpsed through the window on two occasions. However, though present, Kiarostami's social commentary is neither insistent nor imploring.

Among the many vital ideas coursing through 10 is the precarious relationship between its abstract, minimalist plan and the unfiltered immediacy of its naturalistic reality--all the human exchanges, affairs, and actions that never leave the audience's sight and that we experience as genuine and unstylized. Here Kiarostami's unobtrusive approach entails an intriguingly peculiar minimalism, far more extreme than the formalist tendency toward stylistic subtraction and austerity that interacts with his humanist, empathic sensibility throughout his preceding body of work. 10 is not merely "radically Bazinian," as Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman observed last September when the film screened at the New York Film Festival. By means of Kiarostami's unique filmmaking process and controlled structuring of reality, the film gives a modernist, self-conscious slant to Bazinian realist notions about cinema. Considering the movie's neutrality of style and Kiarostami's self-effacement, it's nearly filmmaking degree zero. Rather than being 94 minutes of drab video surveillance, 10 moves toward a re-imagining or transformation of video surveillance--one among many of the rich implications with which the film overflows.

Kiarostami, likening himself to a football coach, has said that while he played a directorial role in choosing and shaping the topics of conversation with his non-professional actors, he left them alone during shooting. Nevertheless, this detachment, a step back from the action, keeps his presence and relation to his material prominent in one's mind. This retreat, of course, owes much to technology's capabilities, which Kiarostami first used in his 2001 documentary ABC Africa. As with the interview method of off-screen questions he used in Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), Kiarostami's vision is partly a matter of turning conventional collaborative strategies on their heads and thereby making the viewer reflect on the possibilities of the medium and, maybe more importantly, the place of cinema in life.

In the filmmaker's disengagement, there are, of course, intimations of Warhol planting a 16-mm camera in a dingy room and passively allowing the reel to run out, capturing the narcissistic meandering of Brigid Berlin or Ondine. But within Kiarostami's own career, one can search out inklings of this impulse. There is Kiarostami's much ignored but marvelous contribution to the 1995 film Lumière and Company, an anthology project that enlisted filmmakers to create one-minute shorts using the original Lumière cinématographe. As a bare-bones work of actuality, the short Kiarostami produced stands out as a modest precursor in retrospect. Look towards some of Kiarostami's early shorts, such as Regularly or Irregularly (1981), and one finds his playful structuralist roots that tie in with 10's form.

The film's series of 10 encounters come to us interspersed between a black-and-white 10-second countdown, as if all the viewer is seeing is the prelude to something more--both the prologue to some imaginary film to come and a complement to the video coda of Taste of Cherry. I also like to interpret it as another suggestive way of conceiving a new relation between video and film, calling to mind Godard's own video-film inversion in In Praise of Love. Regardless, in the end, one of 10's most significant achievements is that it leaves its interplay with reality open and intriguing, there for those who want to ponder it.