Jean-Luc Godard wrote in 1956 that if the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone among directors could reinvent it. Can the same not be said today of Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami? Especially now that, with his latest film, Ten, he has reinvented cinema at least four times, having done it already in his masterpieces Closeup (1990), Through the Olive Trees (1994), and A Taste of Cherry (1997).

In Ten, a more radical and minimal work than those, the director’s starting point is the refusal of almost everything that has come to define the art of film and almost every way for a director to intervene. The whole of Ten is shot (on digital video) from two cameras apparently attached to the dashboard of a car: one is trained on the driver (Mania Akbari), an attractive middle-class Tehran woman in her early 30s, the other frames the passenger’s seat, which different people occupy in turn, starting with the driver’s seven-year-old son, Amin (Amin Maher), whose anger at her for having divorced his father is the film’s emotional starting point. The only camera movement is that of the car in relation to the city streets and roads, which are seen constantly through the side windows.

A strip of countdown leader, from 10 to 1, numbers each of the film’s episodes. This countdown illuminates the film’s main structural and thematic concern: the subtraction of elements. Each of the 10 episodes is about the taking away of someone from someone else. The film is all transitions; the important things have happened somewhere else and become matters of report. The heroine’s discussion with her mother, in which Amin’s future is decided. The rejection of three female passengers by their boyfriends. The decision by one woman to shave her head and by another to become a prostitute. The death of a fourth woman’s husband and child.

Ten is a reflective film about the politics of everyday life. The heroine’s divorce has defined her. Perhaps it’s made her more sensitive to the condition of women in Iran; perhaps she was able to take her step only because she already saw her condition in political terms. Whatever the case, she’s involved with each of the women to whom she gives a ride, and she’s implicated in the questions she asks them about their choices and feelings. She has a conviction, which she articulates to Amin in the film’s first shot: "No one belongs to anyone, not even you. You belong to the world." Later, to a woman who is distraught because her lover has abandoned her, the heroine says: "We women are unhappy. We don’t love ourselves. We don’t know how to live for ourselves."

The form of Ten, though perhaps forbidding on first encounter, proves ideal. A magnificent cinematic object, the car is both setting and vehicle, both the cause and the measure of flow. On their journeys, the driver and her passengers constantly encounter and interact with other drivers, pedestrians, and space; these interactions are always impressive for their casual hipness and their intensely qualified patience. In such a stripped-down film, the withholding of reverse shots takes on great importance. Non-movement becomes a form of emphasis, as in section #2, the film’s summit, in which the sudden immobility of the background gives tremendous force to the passenger’s display of her shaved head.

The emotional power of Ten comes from several factors: its essential ambiguity (are the scenes scripted? documentary? improvised?); the depth and sensitivity of Mania Akbari’s performance; the brilliance of the scenario; and the discreet and restrained treatment of the central narrative action — the mutual rejection by mother and child. This action isn’t completed at the end of the film, and in a sense it never even takes place, but it eventually will have happened. At several moments, Amin takes great interest in the gears of the car, and he asks his mother to explain them. His mother, to him, is someone who has destroyed his home and who now drives a car, and in the future he’ll remember her, perhaps, as someone with whom he would talk now and then in the car. Ten, a document of the flow of present time, acquires much of its poignancy and weight from the implied perspective of the future.