10
In my mind, there isn’t as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one. –Abbas Kiarostami in an interview
Kiarostami’s 10, opening this week at the Music Box, may well represent one of these disjunctions, for in it he seems to have abandoned much of what he’s done best in terms of visual composition, richness of detail in sound and image, diversity of characters and landscapes, and storytelling. Yet it has forced me to consider whether I’ve been misconstruing what he’s capable of–regarding only the traits I like most as the essential ones. I found 10 more immediately exciting as journalism in some respects than his other recent features. And I found it less immediately exciting as art, though repeated viewings have made it seem artistically fresher every time–even the drama becomes sharper with repetition. Kiarostami’s mastery of his material also remains evident throughout, even if it’s less obvious; the best example is his capacity to make the numerous jump cuts in the opening sequence virtually invisible. As J. Hoberman recently noted in the Village Voice, “Paradoxically, Kiarostami’s own absence serves to push his style to its limit. The more minimal the movie, the more it is recognizably his.” I wonder if this might also be said of his recent half-dozen experimental shorts about water, which are expected to surface at Cannes next month.
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Since I regard Kiarostami as the most gifted director now working anywhere in the world, it stands to reason that my expectations when I first saw 10 were abnormally high. It hasn’t met all those expectations, but by changing the rules of the game it has given me more to ponder than recent, more satisfying works by other directors. Kiarostami takes risks that go well beyond the alleged risks taken by commercial wizards such as Steven Spielberg, who’s never come close to truly challenging his audience, not even in 1941.
There’s something indescribably poignant about the pseudonewsreel prologue to The Beginning or the End (1947), a docudrama I recently saw about the development of the atomic bomb, especially now that there’s been talk within our government about using nuclear weapons again. We see actors playing scientists from the U.S., Canada, and the UK burying a time capsule, to be opened in 2446, beside 3,000-year-old California redwoods. “Among the many items and records sealed in the time capsule,” intones the narrator, “were a movie projector, with instructions for its use engraved on copper, and a print of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture dramatization The Beginning or the End–a title expressing the fear of people today that a future atomic war may destroy all humanity.”
It’s worth noting that in recent years Kiarostami has been making films mainly for international audiences, not Iranian ones, which hasn’t been by choice. I heard that The Wind Will Carry Us never opened in Tehran because it was deemed uncommercial, and it seems that ABC Africa hasn’t been seen widely in Iran either. Kiarostami hoped 10 would get a broad Iranian release, but censors said he had to make cuts in two sequences, which would have forced him to remove the sequences entirely–a step that logically would have necessitated retitling the film 8. I haven’t heard which sequences these were, but the likeliest would probably be the one with the prostitute (seven), the one in which Amin discusses the porn his father watches on satellite TV (five), or the one in which the young woman, whose hopes for marriage have recently been dashed, removes her scarf to reveal that she’s shaved off most of her hair (two).
It would be overstating the case to call 10 feminist, yet it broaches the issue of the condition and suffering of women in a world dominated by men in a way no other Kiarostami feature has done. He pointedly limited his male cast to one bratty ten-year-old and brief glimpses of the boy’s father, who’s some distance away in another car as he either drops off or picks up the child. Kiarostami has more to say here about the Iranian patriarchy than ever before, but at no point does the film become preachy. As in his other features, Kiarostami trusts in the intelligence and imagination of the viewer. (Even the two sequences in near-darkness–which recall the passages of darkness in his previous three features–require the viewer’s active participation.)
