Monday, December 13, 2004
I finally got the chance to see Abbas Kiarostami’s 2002 film Ten tonight, having picked up the recently released R1 DVD over the weekend. Kiarostami has been one of my favorite filmmakers since I first saw Where is the Friends Home? in the mid-90s. It’s frustrating how difficult it still is to get to see his movies in this country - even after the “success” of Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us. I believe Through The Olive Trees was released on VHS, but I was never able to track it down (which I mention here to show my continuing frustration). I wasn’t sure Ten was ever going to make it out in R1, and was even considering ordering the expensive French DVD, so this release is much welcome and hopefully a sign of more to come in 2005 (check out the filmography in the liner notes). Actually Ten is quite a bit different than the other Kiarostami films I’ve seen, it’s actually quite a bit more minimalist than any of the others, which is amazing considering his natural approach is already pretty much, keep it as simple as possible. Here, the whole 90 minute picture is shot on digital video inside a car in long takes, with very few edits. There’s ten numbered scenes as a woman drives around town, giving rides to people and having conversations, with her son (a few times), her sister (twice), and a few strangers. Mostly the camera is focused on their faces (from a dashboard type angle) - we only catch brief glimpses of the city racing by, behind their heads. The film has a very documentary feel, to the extent that you wonder if some of the participants even knew they were being filmed. There’s also an 83 minute “legitimate” documentary on Ten, shot by Kiarostami included on the DVD that I expect explains how the film was actually made (which I’ll probably watch tomorrow night, and have all my questions answered). The main thing here is that somehow Kiarostami has delivered 90 minutes of cinema that is unlike any other movies you can see anywhere else - found a truly original approach to showing & telling his tale of a divorced & remarried Iranian woman and her relationship to her son, to her family and to society - and though the movie, we can see that society, that really, we could see no other way.
