10. Introductions
Ten is a great film. Ten car journeys, ten dialogues, ten emotional situations. The result is the most powerful sense of intimacy: a power deriving from the depth of realism achieved. Watching Ten, in contrast to the comfortable contract of voyeurism associated with most film viewing experiences, fact or fiction, one has the slightly uneasy sense of sudden personal involvement. A film supremely sensitive to the impact of some lives on others lives, it is as if the spectator is welded into the fabric of the car the inanimate eavesdropping on the animate.
In it, seasoned Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami uses the dramatic potential of modern digital video technology to wonderful effect. To his long-standing practice of asking non-professional actors to play themselves, he now adds his own physical absence from the film shoot. The director is not behind the camera. Instead, Kiarostami used two digital video cameras only slightly bigger than a 20-pack of cigarettes, trained on the front seats of a car, to shoot the film. He edited it from 23 hours of footage.
Ten centres on a divorced woman and her relationship with her son, Amin. The actress Mania Akbari is herself a divorcee, and Amin is her own son. We watch the son, without inhibition in the way todays children can be with parents, caught between his separated mother and father in their battle for possession, self-possession and respect. Through the mothers struggles with the child, a little tragedy is played out. Pride and possessiveness make communication hideously painful. Meanwhile, various aspects of womanhood are embodied by the women who catch a lift with Akbari. This is a drama of the deferred nature of human fulfilment a tragedy most people in any audience are all too able to identify with, in any country.
9. Tragedy
To describe Ten as a little tragedy is not to belittle the film, but to describe a quality which makes it particularly fitting to a modern understanding of the tragic. Perhaps great tragedy need not be epic or all-encompassing right now. The purifying depiction and recognition of human imperfection does not ring true to us if it makes grandiose claims. Instead, we are offered the tragedy of the passing minute, the momentary gesture, frown or falsehood gestures that express the difficulty of living amongst humanity, gestures that perpetuate this difficulty.
Ten begins once a million of these gestures of daily life have already been played out between its characters, and the small tragedies of their lives are set. In the films opening scene, mother and son negotiate a familiar game of cat and mouse in and between the rutted tracks of past deceptions and betrayals. The mother defends her right to divorce and tries to make Amin see the difficulty of her position in society, in the process defaming Amins father. Amin reacts violently, strenuously defending his father, and soon adding to the mutual bad-mouthing he deplores. Each seems trapped, unable to give or receive help.
In the moment of viewing, it does not matter that we cannot distinguish between the fictional scenario, and whatever the relationship is between the real little boy, Amin and Mania, his mother. In his 1990 classic Close Up, Kiarostami balanced his drama on the knife-edge between reality and performance. In Ten, the sense of real, unmediated selves is what matters most. Its scenes have a similar fascination to the margins of a home movie when the camera catches glimpses of unguarded reality. But by focusing, not on an involved plot line, but on the essential aspects of a character reacting to events in the context of a particular life situation, Kiarostami allows the smallness of contemporary tragedy to breathe freely. The final moment of Ten suggests continuation rather than resolution.
8. Control
I spoke to both Abbas Kiarostami and Mania Akbari in London, before Ten opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). On this visit at any rate, Kiarostami demonstrated a mild contempt for publicity, suddenly cutting a day of interviews to a quarter. He is aware that he is an acquired taste, and does not seem to feel the need to widen his appeal, as long as he can go on making the films he wants. As he put it, My films do not have a large audience in any country an attitude that scarcely deters either the rapt attention of an ever-swelling, loyal following, or growing critical approval.
I knew he rarely talked about his emotions or personal life in detail, preferring to let his films stand for themselves. In interviews over the years, Kiarostami has concentrated almost exclusively on the technical and philosophical aspects of his films. But his reticence did not come across as shyness. My fifteen minutes with him suddenly seemed rather intrusive.
I need not have worried. Despite the dark glasses shielding his eyes, this well dressed, well preserved 60-odd, far from being a difficult customer, was obliging, polite and tolerant of my imperfect Farsi. He also oozed control. Meticulous in his movements, gesturing fluidly and smiling little, his physical impression echoed the understated, subtly structured, but nevertheless immaculate control he exercises over his films. It reminded me of his one film appearance that I can recollect, in his documentary Homework(1989), where he questions the nervous school children about themselves, his eyes invisible behind dark glasses, his face as impassive as the hard lens of the camera beside him.
A distraught interviewee in Homework
7. Triangle
But Kiarostami is clearly able to temper this quality with the gentleness, charm and understanding of people that leads his non-professional actors to trust him with the manipulation of their images and their cinematic selves. I wanted to know about the emotional burden of directing people, a question that he deftly sidestepped to concentrate on the films emotional effect on the audience:
Ed Hayes: I found the first scene of the film, with its depiction of the friction between the mother and son, very painful to watch. How do you maintain that balance that I see between the compassion and the ruthlessness of the director in your films?
Abbas Kiarostami: I dont know whether I was able to or not. However, what we have got yes indeed, it was hard. In the screening [at the London ICA the previous evening] you saw that people laughed. They found it very funny. They saw the sarcasm, but they were not aware of the sheer difficulty of the relationship between those two human beings. For me, I understood their laughter, but at the same time I would say that they were not understanding the problems of this relationship at all. It was compelling, but well, it wasnt amusing.
Kiarostami drew attention to the difference in the reaction of the audience to his own interpretation of the scenes, because their reaction, right or wrong, is clearly of the utmost interest to him. At a question-and-answer session preceding the special screening of Ten, he did not want to disclose its details to those members of the audience who had not yet seen it. His stated aim has always been to make space for the interaction of the audience in his films, by weaving in narrative lacunae, scenes shot in darkness, moments of stasis and other spaces, saying, This is what I call a film: a triangle of the director, the actor and the spectator. (See a report of another interview.)
Nevertheless, it is a definitive version of reality that Kiarostami presents us with. No relativising post-modernist his priority is to project the essential nature of his subject.
6. Morality
Ten is free of any kind of narrative commentary on the action. There is no swelling music to guide our reaction, no special make-up or lighting to demarcate good from bad. Instead, it is a moral arena. The films discussion of morality is presented by characters who represent different perspectives on universal questions. Morality is depicted in its differences, not to render it meaningless, but to show that it is contested. The mother justifies her own freedom and her divorce as a necessary escape. Her son asserts the impact of this rupture on his own life. The conflict between the two is not only a selfish assertion of each ones own needs. They are disputing the extent to which one should be bound to other people: their desires and needs. At first, the mother asserts her right to be unfettered, telling her son that he does not own her nor she him. In the midst of the shouting, Amin appears reasonable while his mothers repeated emphasis on freedom begins to sound ridiculous:
Mania:Ill tell you something. No one belongs to anyone, not even you; youre my child but youre not mine. You belong to this world
Amin: Sure
Mania:
We try to live here
Amin:
Thats right
but you dont let me speak! Im only a child. I cant belong to myself. I have to grow up to attain an age that will allow me to belong to myself.
Mania: Whats your problem today? You have to be mine?
Later, Mania accidentally gives a ride to a prostitute. This presents her and us with a very different conception, both of freedom and the bondage of social ties. Perversely attracted to the prostitutes lifestyle, she cannot reconcile herself to the idea of relinquishing the bond of love. When Mania asks her passenger about how she is able to reduce physical love to a transaction, the prostitute pokes fun at her naive sense of the relations between people, showing that there are material trade-offs in every relationship:
Prostitute: Who bought you that necklace?
Mania: It's fake. Im not too keen on jewellery.
Prostitute: Who bought it for you?
Mania: My husband.
Prostitute: You see
[giggling] and that night he gave you
Mania: Youre saying that life is all trade?
Prostitute: I dont care
but you have to give and take as well. [pause] Youre the wholesalers and were the retailers.
Then there is the lift Mania gives to a dutiful old lady, whom she picks up to help her journey to a mosque. She describes her hardships and the importance of prayer. The word Islam means submission, and this old lady represents this element of religion, contrasting with the younger Manias struggle against the world around her. She quavers that she has only a pilgrimage rosary to her name; that she gave away all her possessions, her ten pillows and her eight mattresses. Manias response, Very good, the fewer ties you have, the better, seems rather hard-hearted, a suspicion confirmed by the occasion when she scolds a sister abandoned by her husband of seven years, for being over-dependent. Even though she is in the driving seat, she is not shown as infallible. These alternative attitudes to living in the world are left to vibrate in harmony or dissonance upon the screen.
5. Charm
Abbas Kiarostami is an exacting director when it comes to achieving the realism he wants. In Homework, playing the adult inquisition he remains impassive as a child weeps, terrified by the ordeal, until his friend arrives. For one scene in Ten where a character had to appear miserable, he told us, he invited the actress to give him a call any time she was feeling really wretched. That is when they shot the scene. The old lady who had given away all her possessions was entirely unaware of the cameras presence, merely making use of a lift in Mania Akbaris car. Throughout filming her son, Amin thought they were only doing screen tests, and wanted to know when the real film would start.
Mania, however, was consciously willing to put herself entirely in his hands. In the question-and-answer session, she often deferred to Kiarostami, pausing over a question that she considered might give away something important about the film, and thereby court his disapproval.
Yet it is more of a two-way relationship than this might suggest: a deeper trust between artists, built up in the process of filming. As Mania described it, Even though I did not watch many films, I was really excited by Close Up. After seeing it, I decided that one day I should definitely get to know Abbas Kiarostami from close quarters. Hearing along the grapevine that he was planning to make a film about women, Mania sent him a fax expressing interest. In composing her fax, she said she tried to tailor it to Kiarostamis own style: sincere and minimalist. He asked her to write something or film something, and so she made a film of herself talking to the camera about herself. He watched it and explained how he would make it less theatrical. She shot another video. Kiarostami liked it and they started shooting. Originally Mania was to be in one section of a planned film on conversations between a psychiatrist and his patients. But as shooting went on, Kiarostami concentrated on her. The film became Ten.
During the question-and-answer session, Kiarostami joked that while people normally say that he has ruined their lives, Mania says he has made hers better through making the film. About ruining lives, was he in jest or in earnest? The kind of exposure that it takes to produce the accurate distillation, which is the hallmark of his characters, must surely vanish once the film is over. What must it be like to lose these creatures of ones art, once the charming and coaxing is over?
Untitled (1999), oil on canvas by Mania Akbari
4. Guidance
The word Abbas Kiarostami used to describe his role was not control. It was hedayat guidance, a term that retains a sense of the free will of the subject, like divine guidance. The film was shot according to a script, but this was for Kiarostamis eyes only. Before shooting a scene, he would describe the situation he required, and the actress would drive off with the cameras rolling. Direction took place after watching the footage, a different method to the conventional directors sculpting of screen performance:
Kiarostami: Really, I guided her in order that she manifest her own self more. At first, yes, she was a bit theatrical. I made her understand that I did not want her to act, I wanted her to be close to herself. I told her dont act and be yourself and so she understood in her role it was necessary that she should be with the realities of her self rather than playing a part, and should not think about the films shed seen and the characters shed seen, and so she altered and became more herself.
Certainly, both Kiarostami and Mania were in agreement over what realism comprised a closeness to ones self, to ones essential nature. But there may be nothing at all obvious about being oneself:
Mania Akbari: We watched some of the rushes together after filming and he would say, Here you are very angry, excessively so, and its not good to be so angry. So lets do the sequence again tomorrow noon, or afternoon, and try to bring your tone of voice down, be less angry in your dialogue. If you watch yourself, youll see it wasnt good at all. I saw that he was right it was very aggressive, very angry. When I saw this, I could act better. It was better for me.
Ed Hayes: You didnt feel that he was interfering in your role?
Mania Akbari: No, not at all, because I felt that in this film the acting doesnt dominate as such. He mainly reminded me of myself. He would say Watch out! Your anger and harshness sometimes become aggravating. This particular moment in the film wasnt actually important to him, but I was seeing myself within the film and I realised that I had to be more humble. This film had a very therapeutic aspect for me. Why? Because I saw into myself, into my moods, my contradictions, my psychological contrasts.
If you have seen Kiarostamis films, this will ring bells: the overall mood of many of his films is resignation to life and a certain restraint. Kiarostami has vigorously affirmed his dislike for the noisy films produced in Hollywood, or in Iran on an American model. While obviously correcting a theatricality in Mania Akbaris performance, he seems also to be recommending a way of life to his actress; she should achieve a more balanced essential character as well as a more balanced performance. What are we dealing with here? Film direction hovering on the edge of counselling? Mimesis forever sliding towards the pursuit of an ideal? The correction of her character is a move closer to the real, but also a move towards the ideal.
Abbas Kiarostami and Mania Akbari during the filming of Ten
3. Therapy
Ten vividly captures this tension within Manias nature. It made me recall the incredible performances Kiarostami coaxed out of the child-like Sabzian, sinning, lying and confessing in Close Up, or the astute, shy, betrayed child, Farzad, in The Wind Will Carry Us. Realism remains the stated intention. But Kiarostamis cinema homes in on the actors awareness of an artistic ideal, which parallels the self-improvement of our actual lives. Ten enshrines a fascinating cinematic analogue to the uncertainty principle. As we try to capture the essence of Manias character in fleeting encounters, it really changes.
Abbas Kiarostami: Her character changed. Her irritability altered. She became aware of her very aggressive state. Very gradually it happened in the course of the film that she became quieter, more tranquil and the result was that her character turned, and the film became dynamic. This was in the course of three months of shooting
This change, and the resulting change which we witness in the relationship between mother and child, is very powerfully represented in the final cut of Ten. At first, in her clashes with Amin, his mother is desperate to justify herself. She compares her husband to her new man. She says that before she was like a corpse, whereas now she is like a river in full flood. Of course Amin will react badly to this. By the end of the film, they still argue, but the mother is less anxious to justify herself. While there is enough tension in her relations to preclude a happy ending, she seems more relaxed, resigned to the inevitability of her little tragedy the fact of distance emerging between her and her son. In all great dramas we witness characters changing as they live through events, and we change with them. In retrospect, Mania recognised this process as a kind of purification of her own state:
Mania Akbari: In the moment of performance, I didnt think about it as a dialogue with the world, but afterwards, many of my inner fears poured away. Why? Because I thought that I was making a connection with all the people of the world I have cried out some of my own words, my internal needs, with a loud voice and this was, for me, very calming.
2. Mirrors
It is something new for Kiarostami that he should concentrate so unswervingly upon the directly human. (Tens only respite from this comes from snatches of Tehran glimpsed behind the characters, through the car window.) Even his A Taste of Cherry returned time and again to the images of the earth being turned over by diggers on a construction site, and finally to shots of the car from a distance, contextualising humanity within the landscape. Kiarostami originally studied fine art at university whilst paying for his studies by working as a traffic policeman. Only later did he find his way into a job making adverts. He still paints, and takes landscape photographs.
But in Ten, Kiarostami leaves aside his great credentials as a cinematic landscape artist, relying entirely on his ability to direct people. Not, it seems, as in a theatre. There is no less emphasis on the films artifice, which remains with us throughout, in its countdown of scenes numbered 10, 9, 8 . The metaphor Abbas Kiarostami offers me to describe his role, is of a dynamic mirror:
Abbas Kiarostami: I imagine that everyone, who uses a mirror to look closely at him or herself, changes. I employ such a mirror so that one can examine, discern ones faults, so that one can make a fuller comparison of oneself in connection with others. Cinema can be a mirror in which we see ourselves, but also those around us within society, helping not just the actor, but also the spectator.
He was positively keen to make the point that he did not choose his actors because they were exceptional, but rather representative of something universal. We can see this in the presentation of a number of women in different stages of their lives, or in the search for balance in Manias character. She is not the star of the film, but the fulcrum for the interaction between various representatives of humanity. If she doesnt exactly represent us she probably does something more important than that. She is like us.
For Mania Akbari, also, it is a painters analogy which springs to mind:
Mania Akbari: In my view, this film Ten resembles Cezannes Coffee Table. You know why? Because in this film, both we, the spectators, are in the effect, and at the same time the effect is in us. Because it is a reality from the inner parts of every person.
Still life with kettle by Paul Cezanne
1. Limbo
The audience at Tens ICA screening contained a fair proportion of expatriate Iranians, who questioned the political connotations of the film. There was an audible ripple through the audience at Kiarostamis emphatic denial that he was trying to make any political point. For a community many of whom have been excluded from Iran since the revolution, a condemnation of the present regime is the mandatory gesture.
Meanwhile, the western press has repeatedly identified Amin, Manias son, as a symbol of Iranian manhood. As the only male who gets into the car, maybe it is tempting to extrapolate from this to the point where Ten becomes a critique of Iranian patriarchy. Amin, ordering his mother to be more traditional, becomes a portrait of burgeoning Iranian masculinity. (He tells her that she should have been at home more, cooked him more meals and washed up, rather than leaving it to the maid.) One critic even commented on Amins quintessentially Islamic hand gestures of argumentation.
But when is a quintessence quintessential? True, Kiarostami has long grappled with the difficulty of portraying women realistically under the strict guidelines laid down by Iranian film censorship. However, Mania for one, concurred with his categoric denial of the films Iranian politics:
Mania Akbari: This film, in my opinion, talks about how relationships today are empty and distant from love. All women in the world, and men for that matter, thirst for love. This film isnt anti-men. Relationships have become transactions, have become materialist. I think this is what the film shows.
It is true that Manias character rails against the difficulty of a womans life in Iran today, having to claim that their husband is a drug addict to procure a divorce. But this is her statement in character, not part of an overall polemic. Amin has difficulties also. His fierce complaints against his mother are less the demand of a self-conscious burgeoning masculinity, than a childs impotent sense of instability in a world where his parents are at each others throats.
I found myself apologising to Mania for our tendency to see the veil in everything that comes out of Iran. But she excused this reduction, as really the fault of Iran. It was, she argued, the conservative authorities who had politicised the veil, so that it is no longer through religious conviction that it is worn, as was previously the case. The veil has been secularised.
In general, Ten, by portraying those strands of Iranian life which tally most with our own, gives the lie to any simple notion of a fundamentalist Iran. This is not another exotic film about Kurdish peasants. Mania Akbaris character is well off, educated, sceptical and urbane. In one scene, discussing with a friend the reasons for praying at the mosque, theirs is the uncertainty and yearning common to the experience of spirituality in the modern age:
Mother/driver/Mania Akbari: You believe now?
Friend: To a certain extent. Actually when I come to the shrine it soothes me.
Mother/driver/Mania Akbari: Anyhow. I havent found peace of mind yet. One day maybe
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