Ten, by Abbas Kiarostami

Why is the simple so effective? The long answer may have something to do with the clinging hopefulness that any one of us could have created the fascination we are watching. Short answer: it just is, and Ten, Abbas Kiarostami’s 2002 film is a superior example of the cinema of simple.

Ten is a model off the simplistic in all its forms, yet it is in that rare breed of cinema that already feels timeless. You know this film will be viewed and appreciated no matter the time or location in the future: a document of how life remains eerily similar from generation to generation.

Two cameras mounted onto a car, one pointed at the driver – the other at the passenger seat - total nearly the entire composition of the film, as we watch a young mother travel around what we assume to be Tehran: chatting, consoling, arguing, debating, and connecting with (or sometimes alienating) the various people in her life, and a few strangers to boot.

The driver becomes the de facto protagonist as we watch her struggle to connect with her young son, who blames her for the divorce of his parents, and insists upon arriving in her car to be taken to his grandmother’s. In and of itself a volatile relationship that crosses cultures and generations, but Kiarostami takes us a step deeper than most filmmakers, not simply languishing in the familiar territory of the misunderstood child and the apparent negligent mother. In the first scene we witness between the two, the mother continually puts words into the boy’s mouth; and not just any words, words to the effect that the boy is smothering her because he wants her all for himself.

Undoubtedly, these are real feelings felt by many, particularly women, and particularly women in countries with similar laws and politics to Iran, but the expression of these feelings paints the mother, the protagonist, in an equally dim light as her “selfish” son if viewed from a different lens.

As the camera, sound, lighting, and editing remain simple, the characters start out-of-the-gate at a level of complexity, rarely found at the denouement of most films.

It is significant that the film opens with this introduction to the mother and the son, as the rest of the film focuses most of its attention on the relationship the driver and her female passengers have with the men in their lives. Including a prostitute we never see (simply hear from the seat beside the driver), as she stands by her chosen profession, as well as her position within that hierarchy, as only the truly judged can. The impression left is that the prostitute is leaps and bounds ahead of her sisterly counterparts in not only her basic self-esteem, but her importance in traditional society. A statement, if interpreted this way, of massive significance.

Kiarostami himself states that his cinema often consists of landscapes; deep, rolling backdrops for minimalist action to play itself out in front of the grandeur that nature provides. It is special then, that he has given us Ten, where the foreground and background are spoken within the words, and we can witness real peoples' struggles no matter where they live. Ultimately, we find the same resolution; and that being, none to speak of.