Like Someone In LoveAccording to Martin Scorsese, “cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame, and what’s out.” The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami applies this axiom with particular rigor. In the first scenes of Mr. Kiarostami’s latest feature, “Like Someone in Love,” we are very much aware of what is not in the frame. We are in a Tokyo bar, listening to a series of conversations that involve a woman we cannot see.
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In due time, we will learn more about her — she is Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a university student working as a call girl — but that initial disorientation, the sense of being in Akiko’s presence without knowing her, sets the tone for this elusive, formally meticulous and surprisingly powerful movie.
After haggling with her businesslike pimp, chatting with a friend and arguing on the phone with her jealous boyfriend, Akiko reluctantly sets off to meet a client, an elderly, widowed scholar who lives in a modest, book-cluttered apartment just outside the city. Their encounter is awkward and a little pathetic but also courteous and sweet, and Mr. Kiarostami plays with our implicit assumptions about what kind of a story this might be. The old man, Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), seems motivated more by loneliness than by lust, and in Akiko’s eyes he may serve as a surrogate for her doting grandmother, who leaves worried messages on her voice mail.
Various suspect and sentimental fantasies hover in the air: the hooker with a heart of gold; the sympathetic john rescuing a young woman from the degradation of sex work. It’s not impossible that both Takashi and Akiko have seen “Pretty Woman.”
But Mr. Kiarostami is not the man you would go to for a remake. His method is both straightforward and enigmatic; some of the films he made in Iran in the 1990s combine documentary techniques with the abstract, oblique qualities of lyric poetry, and impart a beguiling sense of strangeness to ordinary, even banal situations.
He has recently added a dash of exoticism to the mix, traveling outside his home country — to Italy for “Certified Copy,” and now to Japan — and working with non-Iranian actors. (His earlier foray into foreign territory was the 2002 documentary “ABC Africa.”) The cultural and linguistic barrier is hardly obvious in “Like Someone in Love,” which can feel, in its melancholy, sympathetic detachment, rather like a Japanese film.
“Like Someone in Love” takes place almost entirely in confined spaces, including Takashi’s living room and, especially, the inside of his Volvo station wagon. Mr. Kiarostami is a master of nonaction automotive cinema. His 2002 film “Ten” takes place entirely in a car navigating Tehran traffic, and “Taste of Cherry,” which shared the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1997, turns a battered sedan into a forum for philosophical inquiry. An automobile is both a private and a public setting, a bubble of intimacy exposed to the rush and push of the outside world, a zone of safety that is also, objectively, one of the most dangerous places to be.
Through most of the film, Akiko is adrift, in transit, in a vulnerable state of in-betweenness without a fixed identity. Her improvised, ephemeral connection with Takashi turns into one corner of a triangle that is completed when her boyfriend, Noriaki (Ryo Kase), shows up, accosting Akiko on her way to an exam, as Takashi watches through the windshield. The older man — perhaps motivated by compassion or force of habit, but maybe also out of mischief — offers some grandfatherly advice, but at the same time participates in a deception that will grow more elaborate and more dangerous as the day goes on.
The gap between appearance and reality is Mr. Kiarostami’s native territory. He is fascinated by the ease with which people can pretend to be, and thus become, different versions of themselves, and sensitive to the ways that cinema can collude in such impostures. “Like Someone in Love” can be thought of as the mirror image of “Certified Copy,” in which a man and a woman (William Shimell and Juliette Binoche), in the course of discussing the nature of truth in art, rearrange their own relationship, to the bafflement (and also the delight) of the audience. Are they strangers? Lovers? Husband and wife? We are not quite sure.
In “Like Someone in Love,” by contrast, the motives and actions of the characters are relatively clear to us but decidedly ambiguous to them. Akiko, Takashi and Noriaki are more or less what they seem: a confused young woman; a kind, lonely old man; a guy with serious anger-management issues.
The structure of the film is, by Mr. Kiarostami’s standards, fairly straightforward, even conventional: it has a teasing start, an expository middle and a startlingly (though not unpredictably) dramatic end. And yet every shot — everything you see, and everything you don’t — imparts a disturbing and thrilling sense of discovery.
Like Someone in Love
Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.
Written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami; director of photography, Katsumi Yanagijima; edited by Bahman Kiarostami; set design by Toshihiro Isomi; costumes by Masae Miyamoto; produced by Marin Karmitz and Kenzo Horikoshi; released by Sundance Selects. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. This film is not rated.
PRODUCTION DETAILS
In Theaters
February 15, 2013
MPAA Rating
Not Rated
Genres
Foreign, Drama
Run Time
1 hour 49 minutes
Filming Locations
Japan
Produced In
France
DIRECTORS
Abbas Kiarostami
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