Try that tactic inside a movie theater, where most of Kiarostami's work shows, and you will get hissed at all the way home. Yet his films are so incredibly personal, so deceptively repetitive, so outrageously contemplative that there comes a moment when the discomfort becomes so great that you have to wonder whether he wants you to stay or go. Kiarostami's taken wry pleasure in the love/hate relationship audiences have had with his movies, noting on many occasions that the greatest films divide, rather than unite. He's used just about every means possible to disrupt viewer passivity, to push the sitters to one side or the other of the fence, adding documentary touches to his fiction (Taste of Cherry's film-of-filming moments), seeding fiction into his documentary (Close-up's reenactments of reenactments), painting seven minutes of darkness (A.B.C. Africa) into the story. His characters fit uneasily into the clothing of day-to-day existence: A driver in Taste of Cherry travels the countryside looking for someone to bury him. The character's existential question is not just meant to be observed; Kiarostami wants you to feel one of your very own in the process of watching.

Kiarostami uncorks Ten's questions from a different bottle. The car that so frequently takes his characters from one gorgeous landscape or plot point to the next doesn't really go anywhere in Ten. It circles the faceless highways of urban Tehran, Iran, with an engagingly burdened female driver (Mania Akbari), pinballing from errand to errand, from bakery to mausoleum to swimming pool, with a series of riders who alternately tease, argue, nag, or cry their way through the journey. We can barely see the roads – they're only glimpsed occasionally from outside a window – because the primary landscape of the film is the driver's face. Kiarostami has put minimalism on max setting, removing himself from the scene by coaching the actors beforehand and affixing a digicam to the dash to capture what they create without him. The characteristic "zig-zag" one critic calls Kiarostami's trademark can be found this time in movement itself, as opposed to a picture. The concentration on beauty often seen in Kiarostami's rolling hills and winding roads gets rerouted to the curves and angles of a woman's face.

She 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've seen all year – at turns witty, angry, shamed, and defensive. The film opens on the impertinent face of her son (Amin Maher), engaged in an ongoing battle with his mother for divorcing his father. She clearly sees her ex-husband as a sexist ("He wants me just for himself") and doesn't exactly recant the maneuvers she had to pull (calling him a drug addict) to move her case through the Iranian legal system. She can't pull back from the argument, and its repercussions echo through the narrative after she drops her son off for swimming and begins to lecture and converse with the procession of passengers who follow.

She picks up a sister, a prostitute, an old woman returning from the mausoleum, and a friend, each in a different state of boredom or duress. The conversations get topical and philosophical (divorce, abortion, the state of womankind), but they never get programmatic. Sometimes they result in amazing one-liners, particularly when the sex worker impales the driver for her line of questioning about the nature of sex work: prostitutes just sell at retail what wives give away at wholesale. More often, the scenes feel too real to be acted. One particularly vérité moment features a woman simply looking in the rearview mirror as she picks her scab.