It might be worth noting that Ten was my first Kiarostami viewing on a big screen. I should also note, with civic pride, that the (by my estimation) 900+ seat theater was absolutely stone-cold sold out. Good job, Minneapolitans and St. Paulenese. I was a little bit worried that the camera-mounted-to-dashboard scenario of Ten might rub-out what I considered to be Kiarostami’s great unsung attribute: his flawless sense of camera placement. But I needn’t have worried, because while it did have the perhaps unwanted effect of occasionally chopping off the tops of heads (in contrast with Taste of Cherry’s editing-incantation of perfectly framed shots and counter shots within Mr. Badhi’s car), it also accentuated and strengthened the presence of (as Rosenbaum lauded) Kiarostami’s offscreen space. By this, I’m referring to not just the bad drivers Mania Akbari’s unnamed character curses at, but rather that the entire cinematic essence of Ten hinges on the notion that the conversations that make up the entirety of the film are, one surmises, privileged. In a society that, as Mania complains, has no use for the independant-minded woman, the only place where she can be simultaneously both candid and in public is when she is in her car — sharing private jokes with her sister, challenging her impudent son, and, in one thrillingly dangerous-seeming night scene, curiously inquiring a prostitute about her motivations for selling her body (her reply: “sex, sex, love, sex”). It’s moments like these that but up a salient barrier between the onscreen and the offscreen worlds. In her car, Mania is elegant, witty, forthright, full of attitude. Out of her car, who’s to say? That’s a different movie… On a side note, the print I saw seemed to have been shorn of most of the celluloid countdown digits (I only saw, I believe, 9, 7, 4, and 2).

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