If not indispensable Kiarostami, unmistakable Kiarostami all the same: driving around in a car for the entire film, the camera peering in over the dashboard during ten separate conversations counted down numerically on screen ("10"... "9"... "8"...). When the first conversation, between a divorced and remarried mother and her voluble young son, stretches out to twenty minutes, the arithmetic seems to bode a running time in excess of three hours. However, the conversations vary in length -- you can't quite say the pace picks up -- and the whole thing comes in at a reasonable hour and a half. The driver remains the same from start to finish, but her passengers take turns: the boy takes the most, with four, and the rest are women, representative of diverse Iranian types. Sometimes the camera fixates on one face throughout an entire conversation (we never do see the face of the pious old woman or the brassy streetwalker), and each conversation maintains an illusion of "real time," even when we can detect blinklike cuts within a single take. In such close quarters, and with such fixation on faces, the shortcomings of the digital-video image are minimized -- limited, really, to the blurry or blanched-out backgrounds outside the windows. (One exception: the second appearance of the once hopeful and now jilted fiancé looks oddly out of focus.) Occasionally the occupants of passing cars will take an unnatural interest in the proceedings, yet the fundamental concept of the film is so artificial that these intrusions hardly disrupt the "reality" of a scene. Indeed the entire film is a tight weave of, on the one hand, the mundane, the casual, the natural (the acting and writing conceal all art), and, on the other hand, the artificial, the formal, the rigorous. The rigor, in all honesty, amounts almost to a physical handicap, a voluntary straitjacket. A restless response in the audience is only to be expected. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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