No Bo Derek to be seen! (Ten (DVD))

Member Name: cswann

Product:	Ten (DVD)
Date:	09/05/05 (1101 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Groundbreaking Iranian cinema, Well acted

Disadvantages: Trying to be a bit too clever, No story

"Ten" is an Iranian movie, from director Abbas Kiarostami. He's an experienced director, and has made over 30 films, but not many of them have been internationally released. Some of his more famous titles include "A Taste of Cherry" (1997) and "The Wind Will Carry Us" (1999).
More recently, Kiarostami, like many other arthouse directors, has had a good experiment with digital video cameras. Others who were quick to use the new techniques included Mike Figgis with "Timecode", and Steven Soderbergh with "Full Frontal", and perhaps it's not always been successful. For "Ten", Kiarostami chose what would seem to be an ideally suited subject for digital film - mounted a camera on the dashboard of a car, and we are simply shown the conversations taking place between the driver and passengers. It's almost like a spy camera.

As the movie's name suggests, there are ten sequences, featuring a different passenger in the front seat, and for each segment we see what looks like an uninterrupted take of either the driver, or the front-seat passenger. The camera doesn't move during the segment, so for each one we see a one-sided view, of one person's reactions, whilst hearing the other. The driver is the same throughout the movie, a woman (Mania Akbari) who has divorced, now living with a new man, and her young son alternates his time between his parents.
Her passengers are - her son (on more than one occasion, as she either picks him up from his father, or drops him off); her sister; a woman who visits the mausoleum to pray; an old woman; and a prostitute, all of whom she drives around the streets of Tehran, usually doing errands on her way.
The scenes of mother/son conversations are the most interesting, and also the most important as regards the 'plot' of the movie - although having said this, you could view all of the 10 segments in any order and it's hard to see that it would matter much, as far as any plot or story is concerned.

The film opens with a scene between the mother and son, almost 15-minutes shot of the boy Amin (played by Akbari's own son, Amin Maher), a child of about 10 who condemns his mother for the divorce. His ingrained sexism is very obvious, and telling. When he says "You're a selfish woman", I at first thought how brattish he was, but then later in the movie started to partially agree with him - after all this seems to be a woman who indulges herself on fairly inconsequential errands - before rejecting the idea (she's also a wellmeaning woman, giving lifts to strangers). Such are the contradictions of daily life - which is ultimately what this movie is portraying. Most of the time it even feels like we're watching real people, rather than actors.
The actors worked from a script, but the noisy sounds of traffic, and the way it is filmed, all give the movie a documentary feel.

Kiarostami addesses the subject of women's changing position in Iran, sometimes subtly, though the way her son speaks to her, sometimes less subtly.
One of her passengers wears her chador tightly wrapped around her neck, and there is a scene later where this is removed, to reveal a newly shaved head. An act of pure retaliation, and possibly very shocking to Iranians. I once read that in one Iranian film the two leads had to be played by a real married couple, for the reason that the woman exposes her ankle during the story. The driver herself doesn't cover herself under a chador, even when she gets out of the car, no doubt an expression of her unwillingness to be bound by the old ways and laws.
Kiarostami himself isn't at all famous for the treatment of women's issues, and this is in fact not even particularly groundbreaking in Iranian cinema, with other Iranian directors, such as Dariush Mehrjui and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, making interesting films about sexual politics and women.

But this movie is groundbreaking for the way it is filmed.

There are some neat touches - a sense that things are cyclical, and things are not going to change much for the women featured. For example, the boy keeps repeating that he wants to go to his grandmother's house, and he'll probably keep on demanding that ever time he gets into the car. The first few minutes are quite gripping in an odd sort of way, but eventually I tired of the movie's lack of real substance.

There were also scenes which seemed unnecessary - especially the one with the prostitute (who we only hear, and never see) - and the eay she even gets into the car is very forced - we're supposed to believe she mistook the driver for a man.

Overall - worth seeing to see the technique, but don't expect a great story, or even any big message that tells you anything more than the predictable "women are opressed in Iran".

But, yes, VERY different from the movie called "10" featuring Dudley Moore and Bo Derek!


91 min long

The DVD is £8.97 from amazon.co.uk
Extras are very brief - trailers; filmography of the director and cast and crew biographies

Summary: