CINEMATIC Review

TEN   **

Abbas Kiarostami

2002

IDEA:  Comprised of ten segments that all take place within the interior of a car, an Iranian woman drives around having various conversations with passengers both familiar and strange.

BLURB:  An intriguing concept – an Iranian woman has ten conversations with various passengers she picks up, the whole thing shot within the confines of a single car – is an experiment ultimately more tedious than it is absorbing. Watch small portions of the film in isolation, and you’ll likely be drawn into the intense conversational patterns of Kiarostami’s non-actor participants, finding select bits and pieces of their dialogue and inflections revealing, even potent. But watch the film in whole, as it was intended, and the staggered structure grows wearingly thin, any initial rumblings of enjoyment gained from the unorthodox style fading rather quickly into indifference and boredom. There are good ideas at work here, some genuinely insightful moments that cast an eye on gender issues in modern Iran, but they deserved something far more cinematically compelling than this.