Critics reviews

Despite the lack of setup, despite even the visibility of one of the scene's participants (to say nothing of her name), the first segment immediately fills in a shared history between the two characters, using loose, passionate dialogue to render exposition with immediacy. This is storytelling rendered in a seemingly free pattern that disguises the deftness of its construction.

[Akbari] is truly a beautiful thing to observe—and not just because her thick lipstick and eyebrow pencil are in perfect place, or because her sunglasses are designer, or her head scarf loosened to a perfect Grace Kelly effect. She is scandalously funny and endearingly true, a character with no name giving the best performance I had seen in that year—at turns witty, angry, shamed, and defensive.

What the film may lack in pictorial beauty it gains in documentary revelation, as the women speak with a candor virtually unseen in Iranian cinema. (Naturally, it was banned in Iran.) TEN is deliberate in its lack of resolution, making it a frustrating experience for some viewers. But Kiarostami's attempt to create a new aesthetic out of recent technology (and to find an analogue for contemporary alienation with such formal transparency) makes this an integral work of recent years.

The bustling world which constantly forces its presence on the characters and us through the car windows suggests other possibilities. Kiarostami finds a simple but brilliant way to express this dynamic: making his actors actually contend with real streets, traffic and strangers takes them out of the interiority of their little lives and stories, and puts them in a constantly surprising relation to the real world.