1.
The other night, a friend told me her personal trainer—a former volleyball player—told her mother that a male friend of his had confessed his love to him upon high school graduation. He hadn’t been aware, since he hadn’t considered it to be a possibility between the two of them, that what he thought of as signs of friendship were, on the one hand, being suffused with affection and burning desire. My friend told me this story since the details were uncannily similar to my own—the volleyball player, the confession, the reaction to the confession—except, for my confession, I’d read aloud a 10-page letter beginning with a quote by the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami: “Someone once said that love is the result of misunderstanding... When we don’t understand someone we fall in love with them. When we realize that individual’s truth, we say they weren’t who we thought. So love is nothing but an illusion.”
This remembrance created a yearning to watch Kiaostami’s films again: so I turned to TEN.
2.
Only 17 minutes into the film—all of which takes place in a car—are we shown the driver. We have a rough idea of who she is based on what she’s said: she’s divorced one man, remarried another, and her son—whom she’s forever in a shouting contest with—resents her. Their relationship reminded me of my mother and I who used to argue on pick-ups from school and drop-offs to work, who were aggressive until both wounded and apologetic. Nowadays when I drive my mother around she vents to me.
In time, the dynamic variegates.
3.
Later, we meet a woman who prays at the mausoleum a second time. Her situation has changed: the man she felt was full of contradictions has rejected her. She has nothing left to lose, so she reveals, gradually then suddenly, that she’s shaved off her hair. “Why,” the driver asks, then is quick to reassure: “But it suits you.” She silently nods as tears fall from her eyes. As someone who is balding, this seems like a privileged, not-so-moving act. I yield my empathy.
4.
The day after watching TEN, I found myself in the passenger’s seat. What would you have seen? Me getting in the car before my partner; squeezing a quarter-sized amount of hand sanitizer into each of our palms; my partner reading through the receipt to make sure the cashier applied the coupon; us going to the drive-thru and waiting in the parking lot and getting into a minor quarrel and then a woman in a neon vest delivering our order, saying she included an apple pie for the inconvenience; us returning home, content.
5.
The last section of TEN is the shortest: the son gets in the car and asks to be taken to Grandma’s. I didn’t grow up with my biological grandmothers, but I did have a substitute Grandma who used to babysit me. One afternoon, I remember, she handed me over to the care of her youngest son—a cologne-doused young man known for his handsomeness—who took me on a ride in his car, in which, for the first time in my life, at four years old, I was asked if I was gay.
I learned then that cars can be sites of dissociation.
6.
In 2016, three months before his death, Kiarostami, in his trademark sunglasses, visited Toronto for a photography exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum. During the Q&A he said: “As individuals, we neglect the importance of doors… that they are responsible in our lives, personal lives and professional lives, in the growth of our beings.”
Without a key, though, a door suddenly becomes a barrier.
7.
The driver in TEN is played by Mania Akbari, a filmmaker, actress, artist, and writer. In 2022, Akbari wrote a letter in which she alleges the film is not by Kiarostami, but by her. It was a personal project, the footage of which he’d asked to borrow “so that he could use them to write a script,” but, instead, he created a film he presented as his own at Cannes, fabricating elaborate lies to present it as a fiction. She alleges that over the years he “abused, raped and harassed [her] physically and mentally.” To watch TEN, then, is to watch a male artist non-consensually appropriating the work of a talented woman; to see it for what it was, now knowing what it is.
8.
The 10 sequences of the film are separated by an arbitrary film leader countdown, and the shortened length for the final sections makes the film feel uneven—dragging until rushed—as though a thief had to make do with what he’d captured. The remarkable “experimental” aspect of the film—Akbari’s meta-fictional footage—is forced to wear the plagiarist-cum-abuser’s form. TEN, then, both is and isn’t a film by Kiarostami. TEN also is and isn’t a film by Mania Akbari. TEN is paradoxically a film that exists despite the fact that there is no definitive author behind it, and one alleges it shouldn’t exist at all. Yet I’m naturally predisposed to want to look at things that shouldn’t be seen, to transgress, to get closer to the realm of the obscene.
9.
Viewed from this context, Kiarostami’s documentary 10 on TEN—in which he delivers a masterclass—is a desperate attempt to defend his reputation. The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum sensed his insincerity: “Kiarostami may be violating more of his own rules. He speaks at length about the virtues of not scripting most of his dialogue, but his discourse here, if not scripted, appears to have been worked out largely in advance.” What made Kiarostami’s films so fascinating was this blurring of reality and fiction; but I never questioned the moral and ethical implications of his cinematic gestures, or how blurring can suddenly become blinding.
10.
In Nicole Krauss’s short story “Seeing Ershadi” two women share an affinity for Homayoun Ershadi, the star of Kiarostami’s Palme d'Or-winning 1997 film The Taste of Cherry. At the end, Romi rewatches the film: "While she’d remembered him as passive, nearly saintlike, now she saw that he was impatient and often surly with the men he approached, and manipulative in the way he tried to get them to agree to what he wanted, sizing up their vulnerabilities and saying whatever was necessary to convince them. His focus on his own misery, and his single-minded determination to carry out his plan, struck her as self-absorbed.”
Meditate on anyone long enough, and you’ll cease to misunderstand them.
1.
The other night, a friend told me her personal trainer—a former volleyball player—told her mother that a male friend of his had confessed his love to him upon high school graduation. He hadn’t been aware, since he hadn’t considered it to be a possibility between the two of them, that what he thought of as signs of friendship were, on the one hand, being suffused with affection and burning desire. My friend told me this story since the details were uncannily similar to my own—the volleyball player, the confession, the reaction to the confession—except, for my confession, I’d read aloud a 10-page letter beginning with a quote by the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami: “Someone once said that love is the result of misunderstanding... When we don’t understand someone we fall in love with them. When we realize that individual’s truth, we say they weren’t who we thought. So love is nothing but an illusion.”
This remembrance created a yearning to watch Kiaostami’s films again: so I turned to TEN.
2.
Only 17 minutes into the film—all of which takes place in a car—are we shown the driver. We have a rough idea of who she is based on what she’s said: she’s divorced one man, remarried another, and her son—whom she’s forever in a shouting contest with—resents her. Their relationship reminded me of my mother and I who used to argue on pick-ups from school and drop-offs to work, who were aggressive until both wounded and apologetic. Nowadays when I drive my mother around she vents to me.
In time, the dynamic variegates.
3.
Later, we meet a woman who prays at the mausoleum a second time. Her situation has changed: the man she felt was full of contradictions has rejected her. She has nothing left to lose, so she reveals, gradually then suddenly, that she’s shaved off her hair. “Why,” the driver asks, then is quick to reassure: “But it suits you.” She silently nods as tears fall from her eyes. As someone who is balding, this seems like a privileged, not-so-moving act. I yield my empathy.
4.
The day after watching TEN, I found myself in the passenger’s seat. What would you have seen? Me getting in the car before my partner; squeezing a quarter-sized amount of hand sanitizer into each of our palms; my partner reading through the receipt to make sure the cashier applied the coupon; us going to the drive-thru and waiting in the parking lot and getting into a minor quarrel and then a woman in a neon vest delivering our order, saying she included an apple pie for the inconvenience; us returning home, content.
5.
The last section of TEN is the shortest: the son gets in the car and asks to be taken to Grandma’s. I didn’t grow up with my biological grandmothers, but I did have a substitute Grandma who used to babysit me. One afternoon, I remember, she handed me over to the care of her youngest son—a cologne-doused young man known for his handsomeness—who took me on a ride in his car, in which, for the first time in my life, at four years old, I was asked if I was gay.
I learned then that cars can be sites of dissociation.
6.
In 2016, three months before his death, Kiarostami, in his trademark sunglasses, visited Toronto for a photography exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum. During the Q&A he said: “As individuals, we neglect the importance of doors… that they are responsible in our lives, personal lives and professional lives, in the growth of our beings.”
Without a key, though, a door suddenly becomes a barrier.
7.
The driver in TEN is played by Mania Akbari, a filmmaker, actress, artist, and writer. In 2022, Akbari wrote a letter in which she alleges the film is not by Kiarostami, but by her. It was a personal project, the footage of which he’d asked to borrow “so that he could use them to write a script,” but, instead, he created a film he presented as his own at Cannes, fabricating elaborate lies to present it as a fiction. She alleges that over the years he “abused, raped and harassed [her] physically and mentally.” To watch TEN, then, is to watch a male artist non-consensually appropriating the work of a talented woman; to see it for what it was, now knowing what it is.
8.
The 10 sequences of the film are separated by an arbitrary film leader countdown, and the shortened length for the final sections makes the film feel uneven—dragging until rushed—as though a thief had to make do with what he’d captured. The remarkable “experimental” aspect of the film—Akbari’s meta-fictional footage—is forced to wear the plagiarist-cum-abuser’s form. TEN, then, both is and isn’t a film by Kiarostami. TEN also is and isn’t a film by Mania Akbari. TEN is paradoxically a film that exists despite the fact that there is no definitive author behind it, and one alleges it shouldn’t exist at all. Yet I’m naturally predisposed to want to look at things that shouldn’t be seen, to transgress, to get closer to the realm of the obscene.
9.
Viewed from this context, Kiarostami’s documentary 10 on TEN—in which he delivers a masterclass—is a desperate attempt to defend his reputation. The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum sensed his insincerity: “Kiarostami may be violating more of his own rules. He speaks at length about the virtues of not scripting most of his dialogue, but his discourse here, if not scripted, appears to have been worked out largely in advance.” What made Kiarostami’s films so fascinating was this blurring of reality and fiction; but I never questioned the moral and ethical implications of his cinematic gestures, or how blurring can suddenly become blinding.
10.
In Nicole Krauss’s short story “Seeing Ershadi” two women share an affinity for Homayoun Ershadi, the star of Kiarostami’s Palme d'Or-winning 1997 film The Taste of Cherry. At the end, Romi rewatches the film: "While she’d remembered him as passive, nearly saintlike, now she saw that he was impatient and often surly with the men he approached, and manipulative in the way he tried to get them to agree to what he wanted, sizing up their vulnerabilities and saying whatever was necessary to convince them. His focus on his own misery, and his single-minded determination to carry out his plan, struck her as self-absorbed.”
Meditate on anyone long enough, and you’ll cease to misunderstand them.