Abbas Kiarostami, in Ten, as in his other films, directly engages material traditionally submerged by narrative. His themes lay about on the surface, sunbathing, while most filmmakers abandon their themes to darkness and eternal paleness.
The material substance of Ten is Mania Akbari in a car, mostly driving, often talking and often listening to a rotating ensemble of passengers, recorded by two dashboard mounted cameras (all the film's photography a product of this setup). The takes are long and the cuts few, Kiarostami prefers to hold on his characters for extended stretches, even when they are not the ones talking; this allows the audience to 'discover' the characters, rather than force the characters and moments into shapes through manipulative editing.
Often the things Amin Maher (Mania's real life son, who plays her son and frequent passenger in the movie) does with his face and body expose details about his relationship with his mother (though he'll tell his mother when she's begun to irritate him, you'll see it on his face first, or perhaps by the way he plays with his schoolbag) and his development as a person. He behaves like a child (squirmy, impatient), but not only like a child: Mania has divorced the boy's father as part of a greater effort for female social lib, so, natural for a boy in this situation, he also exhibits shades of adulthood. In his situation he must express his ideas (or echo cultural ideas he's been taught and not yet challenged for himself). It's a very specific role, the kind that comes from a confluence of real life particulars, and the mother/son dynamics are excitingly complex. In many aspects the boy is a foil to the mother, in some ways an antagonist, a multifaceted symbol of opposition, but always a son.
All other passengers are women, no two are duplicates, and each has her own idea about how to be a woman, how a woman is supposed to behave. Because Kiorastami so expertly grounds his characters in reality, and because in reality women are intricately specific and idiosyncratic, the dramatic action is as simple as developing conversations. When a new person enters the car the talk is at first light and circumstantial, then differences accumulate, unshared opinions collide, and eventually important, basic views become illuminated through dialogue.
Ten is kind of a highbrow essay film version of Taxicab Confessions.
Kiarostami's art is captivating both because of how simple it begins and because of how big and meaningful it becomes. Everything blossoms in his movies. Character revelations have a corollary relationship with an audience member's intelligence and curiosity, and for every one thing at first hidden that Kiarostami slowly reveals, two or three or more things should occur to the audience to consider, such that by the end of the film the audience member may carry tenfold the weight of narrative contemplation compared to films rich and dense in dramatics, but which chain, bound, maybe gag their themes in subtextual dungeons.
And all this produces this amazing and very rare extra layer, a Kiarostami specialty: the cinematic form is a kind of parallel to the film's interior themes. Think of a poem, it's like that, think of it on paper, the way it looks, think of its rhythms, the way it sounds, each part contributing to a total meaning. The way Kiarostami stirs the deeper parts of ourselves through selective and highly important filmic qualities, few (minimal) but important ones, mirrors the nature of Mania Akbari's desire for liberation from tradition. What Akbari wants is both complex and simple, her liberation a matter of choosing her life's path for herself, avoiding, when possible, boundaries imposed by exterior forces.
If it sounds confusing or heavy it's because words get in the way. Everything is crystallized in the movie. Two people talk to each other, shot by one of two cameras, while sitting in a car. That's it (and there's so much more).
No comments:
Post a Comment