10

As simple as a road movie can be

The latest film by the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is a minimalist gesture that will elicit either rapturous hyperbole or outright dismissal. Some will argue that 10's radically stripped-down approach ­ paring away such superfluous fripperies as spectacle, narrative and camera movement ­ makes for a sublime purification of the filmic experience. Others will feel that 10 barely qualifies as cinema, that it's more like a super-cheap form of reality TV that happens to have been made by a name auteur.

Neither response is remotely adequate to the uniqueness of a film best described simply as what it is: 10 scenes in a car. A woman (Mania Akbari) ­ young, elegant, visibly well-heeled ­ drives through Tehran, conversing with a series of passengers, including her pre-pubescent son, her sister and a prostitute encountered by chance. The conversations are shot in digital video; the camera, apparently mounted on the car's bonnet, never moves and, except for one shot, all we see is medium close-ups of driver or passenger. Kiarostami mostly cuts between the two characters in each sequence, but not always; the opening 18-minute segment is effectively a single shot of the driver's son Amin (in reality, it's easy to blink and miss the discreet jump cuts). We don't even see his mother until the end of this episode; until then, she's an agitated voice off-screen, caught in an increasingly heated argument about her divorce and remarriage, which her son bitterly resents.

For 94 minutes, then, all we see is people talking, shot with the drably neutral look peculiar to the DV camera. We can't immediately tell quite what we're watching: fly-on-the-wall (rather, on-the-windscreen) documentary, or seamlessly manufactured fiction? If the latter, then the performances are miraculous. Even by the famously impressive standards of Iranian child actors, the boy who plays (or perhaps, who is) Amin is dazzling. His spontaneity astounds ­ angry flurries of words punctuated by sulky yawns and lofty little signals of contempt, together with those quintessentially Islamic hand gestures of argumentation, picked up from watching adults (or indeed, other Kiarostami films).

Kiarostami has often lingered on in-car conversations, notably in his dauntingly austere The Taste of Cherry. Here, however, he keeps the drama strictly locked inside the vehicle. But why, when he could have opened things up and made a full-blown Iranian Kramer vs Kramer? It's because he's able to prove that the less we see, the more we know: volumes are conveyed about the driver's first marriage by the fact that her ex-husband is never seen directly, only glimpsed in the background at the wheel of a white jeep.

As the car becomes an intimate theatre, bringing us as close as imaginably possible to the actors, the lack of surrounding distractions means that facial expressions, gestures, verbal cadences acquire an unusually heightened readability. Yet because the camera is fixed, we know we can get only so close; there's no chance of the spurious revelation in a sudden extreme close-up. We're always on the other side of the windscreen.

From episode to episode, a subtle, complex picture builds up of the everyday trials of women in Iran. The women in 10 appear to inhabit a liberal, westernised world of health clubs, cable TV and overheard snatches of Robert Palmer on car radios. But what emerges is a picture of Iranian society, not as the universal women's prison of Jafar Panahi's recent The Circle ­ more as an endless traffic jam in which women are obliged to keep moving and to observe men's highway code (it's surely no accident that the heroine constantly has so much trouble parking).

Sex is a prominent and at times (relatively) explicit theme ­ something of a departure in a national cinema normally bound by Islamic criteria of modesty. In one episode, set at night, the driver gives a lift to a prostitute and quizzes her about her work. The laughing hooker ­ who remains unseen until she walks off to find a client, in the film's single shot outside the car ­ lays bare the hypocrisy of a society in which husbands frequent her, while plying their wives with sweet nothings on their mobiles.

The film's most confrontational image is simple yet devastating. In a gesture of despair, defiance or both (it's never explained and doesn't need to be), a young woman rejected by her fiancé has shaved her head. In a cinema where women never appear with heads uncovered, this makes for a remarkable flouting of taboo. The effect is both provocative and deeply poignant: this, Kiarostami is saying, is the bald truth about Iranian women's lives.

For all we know, 10 may be telling its cast's own stories: in auditions, Kiarostami invited non-professionals to talk about their lives. Certainly, his performers enjoy unusual freedom: the compactness and discretion of the digital camera means the actors are all the more confident in their intimacy. 10 is as close as you can get to a film without a film-maker; you wonder in what sense Kiarostami actually directed it, other than choosing the best takes (indeed, the film carries no credits proper, but simply lists names, including Kiarostami's, without distinguishing between cast and crew). Kiarostami has described his job as that of a football coach, doing most of his work before the camera starts to roll. His real achievement is to make himself superfluous: having primed the players, he stays off the field and watches.

10's premise might strike you as a cast-iron recipe for boredom, yet this is the most riveting film of this year. It's radically innovative because it rejects all the novelty tricks that we normally think of as cinematic innovation. And while it may contribute to changing the possibilities of film, it seriously intends to change the world. If you're weary of all the post-Dogme rhetoric about digital video opening up a new snappy, zappy, no-budget cinema, Kiarostami's film will come as a revelation of starker, simpler, richer possibilities. And indeed, if you ever found yourself wondering whether film-making still has any point, then 10 offers a very compelling answer.

j.romney@independent.co.uk