believe in a type of cinema that gives greater possibilities and time to its audience. A half-created cinema, an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience, so resulting in hundreds of films. It belongs to the members of that audience and corresponds to their own world...

In cinema's next century, respect of the audience as an intelligent and constructive element is inevitable. To attain this, one must perhaps move away from the concept of the audience as the absolute master. The director must also be the audience of his own film. For one hundred years, cinema has belonged to the filmmaker. Let us hope that now the time has come for us to implicate the audience in its second century.

-Abbas Kiarostami

For the past three decades, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has been working progressively toward the aesthetic ideal described in the passage above (excerpted from his essay written for the Centenary of Cinema). Constantly and purposefully straddling the line between what traditionally constitutes "fiction" and "documentary" filmmaking as well as employing the poetics of absence to increasingly startling effect, Kiarostami has certainly practiced what he's preached in masterpieces such as Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), Close-up (1990), Life, and Nothing More... (1991), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). With Ten, his latest film, Kiarostami has orchestrated what is perhaps to date his most ingeniously symbiotic marriage of content and film form with his guiding cinematic philosophy. Ten is about as (deceptively) simple as movies get. It's titled for the number of car trips made in Tehran by a beautiful female driver (Mania Akbari), accompanied by various passengers, who are all female with the exception of her obnoxious, demanding ten-year-old son (Amin Maher). Inside the vehicle are two digital cameras capturing the passengers' conversations.

What Kiarostami has made is, in effect, a "director-less" film (that is, one largely lacking the role traditionally attributed to a film's director), just as he hypothesized about in the quote above. While he did prepare extensively with his non-professional actors before sending them out on their own, he was not present during any of the film's scenes, and none of the dialogue is scripted.

Here, now, is the frustrating paradox: Kiarostami is not only the greatest filmmaker working in the world today, but he's also, arguably, the most truly universal. And yet, in the United States, at least, his films could hardly be more rigidly marginalized. They screen at prestigious international film festivals and then eventually open in art-house theatres in a select few cities. They're regarded as "critics' films," an intimidating label to the casual moviegoer who, I believe, could benefit just as much from seeing a Kiarostami film as any discerning cinephile. There's clearly something deeply, depressingly wrong when the work of a visionary artist, with so much to offer in the way of genuinely enriching people's lives through his art, is all but shut off to the overwhelming majority of the American public (admittedly, xenophobia plays a large part in the equation, and the fact that Kiarostami hails from a country included in the our President's so-called "Axis of Evil" helps matters even less).

Carl Dreyer said that The Passion of Joan of Arc was not a film made for academics or aesthetes but for everyone to appreciate. Indeed, the cathartic experience of watching the film completely transcends any target-audience demographics (as we'd put it today); I'm an atheist and I can't help but be tremendously moved by the film every time I watch it! This is precisely because Dreyer was preternaturally skilled at capturing the universal. His work possesses the power to resonate not only with "believers" or Europeans or film scholars, but with potentially every human being.

The same is true of Kiarostami's cinema, and this has never been more evident than in Ten. More directly and naturally than any other film I've seen, it exists purely as an ultimately profound, unflinchingly honest portrait of the world today. This isn't neo-realism. This isn't docu-realism. This is reality-or at least as close as film can possibly get.

Any cultural specifics in the film can be spotted on a global scale, if sometimes to a lesser degree. True, women are not required to wear veils here in the U.S., but they are frequently accused of being at fault for dressing too provocatively when they themselves fall victim to sexual assault (the film also boldly addresses the pros and cons of sexual liberation, romantic sentiment, and a woman's traditional matriarchal role). Divorce is one of the key issues Kiarostami touches on here, and though Iranian law is considerably stricter than that of Western nations in this respect, the ultimate effects of a family splitting apart are certainly no different and no less potentially devastating than anywhere else in the world. In broader terms, Ten is about women's ambiguous, ever-changing roles in society- and not just Iran, but, again, in the world today.

To effectively present his points here, Kiarostami in a sense returns to a cinematic method similar in form to that of Taste of Cherry, which centered on a middle-aged man driving around the outskirts of Tehran in search of someone to assist him in committing suicide. Though we learn a good deal more about Akbari's character than we did about Taste of Cherry's driver, Mr. Badii (Homouyan Ershadi), her personal identity rearranges itself before our eyes, depending on who it is she's driving. This is something that should be known to all of us, but I'd imagine it's something we rarely, if ever, stop to consider; that is, just how inherently fluid our personal identity really is. Kiarostami's essentialist approach lends itself beautifully to making this implicit observation.

What more can one ask from a film than for it to use its medium in a way that expands set cinematic boundaries in order to assist its audience in acquiring a better understanding of both themselves as individuals and the world around them? Not much, in my estimation, and that's exactly what Kiarostami has long attempted and consistently accomplished.