Ten

I was driven practically everywhere by my parents when I was a child. I started taking public transport only in junior college (how's that for sheltered. Or spoilt.) Those car drives were not particularly fond memories: drives to school in the mornings would be spent reciting Chinese essays (don't ask); drives from school would be in silence or, especially as I grew into my teens, various lectures of various lengths on various subjects with various severity. Drives with the family were at best without conversation with the radio on, or at worst in argument, with too much hostility in one sealed metal compartment.

Ten is a Kiarostami film about a female driver and her conversations with her various companions - her son, her sister, an old woman on her way to pray at a mausoleum, a prostitute, a young woman whose boyfriend decides not to marry her, another woman whose boyfriend (or husband) has left her. The entire film takes place in the car, 99% made up of only two kinds of shots: (1) of the female driver; (2) of her passenger at the time.

1. DV films seem inclined towards deceptively simplistic premises: Ten - conversations in a car. Tape - conversations in a hotel room. Russian Ark - conversations between an unseen narrator and a strange wild-haired man as they wander through the Hermitage. Yet, they convey such enormous content: about truth, about sex, about love, life, history, memory.

2. Space is deceptive. Sokurov (in, of course, his single celebrated unbroken shot) wanders through the vast halls and elaborate corridors of the Hermitage for his treatise on the passing of history, culture and memory - he has the setting to emphasise the ambition of his project. But the space of Ten is confined to the driver's seat and the passenger's seat - a combined length of no wider than, say, a metre plus. Yet, it is space enough for all the emotions in the film. It is space enough to contain the grief, the heartbreak, the hostility, the aggression, the resignation, the determination, the anguish.

3. This film has more heartache than any I've seen for a while (and I thought Happy Together was sad enough). Heartache in the uncontrollable sobs of a female passenger whose boyfriend/husband has left her. Throughout the whole journey, she is hidden in shadows, at times completely vanished in the darkness, like her grief that must likewise remain unseen. But there is one split second when a street light suddenly illuminates one startled eye - I don't know whether it is deliberate direction or not, but there are few filmic moments that carry more levels of voyeurism.

Heartache in the quiet sadness of another female passenger whose boyfriend decides not to marry her. She reveals her shaved head, previously hidden under her scarf. Why did she do that? The driver asks. It felt good when she did it, she replies. She sheds a few tears, but her sadness is no less poignant than the wild sobbing of the earlier passenger. She didn't cut her hair because it felt good to do it. I didn't shave my head - but I did cut off my long hair after my first break-up (sixteen, first love and heartbroken). When one loses something inside, sometimes one has to lose something outside to even things out.

Heartache in the pursed, straight-drawn lips of a mother frustrated and grieved by the alienation of her son, helpless in the circumstances (a divorce, a new husband, the competing demands of being a mother and an independent woman), hurt by his constant ignoring of her requests for him to kiss her, her offers to buy him ice-cream, shocked by his resentment of her, frightened by how he is growing up too quickly and too far away from her.

How can a film do so much with so little?