In Ten, Abbas Kiarostami provides the viewer with the most spartan of setups: one car, one woman, two camera angles, ten dialogues. We—by way of the lone camera mounted on the dashboard —follow a beautiful divorcee driving in a car. She picks up ten passengers, one after the other, in ten different vignettes—a prostitute, a jilted friend, her sister, a stranger on her way to a mausoleum, and her precocious, frighteningly articulate son—and takes the audience along for a ride through the streets of Tehran.

The shallowest thing to appreciate about the film (too superficial an observation, really) is that it gives voices to people not usually heard from. It’s also a valuable corrective to the recent emergence of civilizing discourse about Iran—“They drive cars in Iran??” and the like. But there is no easy female identification to fall back on, even if their concerns sometimes seem to coincide with those of Marin County housewives.

There is much to admire about the compactness of Kiarostami’s formal rigor; it’s like Flowers of Shanghai in an economy car. Actually, the Hou reference isn’t entirely inappropriate, because the vehicle slips easily into its role as the, um, driving metaphor for the film: women similarly imprisoned in the confines of their surroundings while the world swirls around them. At least in Ten there’s a dusty windshield that lets you look outside.

But the dialogues themselves are not necessarily meaningful; they are just steeped in the ordinary, which is just fine by me. Much of the film depends on the fascination inherent (at least for me) in hearing the thrusts and parries of arguments, or in seeing how the more passive labors of driving and riding almost naturally elicits talk. Lots of talk. It is ironic, then, that perhaps the most weighted (and, at the same time, most banal) conversations were not about a sisterly solidarity, but between the mother and her pre-adolescent son, the only male physically present in the film: a seemingly endless, circumlocutory series of bickering that echoes the tangled, but not aimless, driving through the Tehran traffic.