There seem to be a lot of times in Abbas Kiarostami’s “Like Someone in Love” that the characters ignore their phone. When they do answer, there’s something lost in translation.
I point out this minute detail because at times it seems to be the only thing to hold our attention in this film about communication between people. The film follows a narrative structure so stripped down that it is at once baffling, boring and beautiful.
It starts inside a bar of people talking and having fun, but the voice we hear is Akiko’s (Rin Takanashi) arguing with her boyfriend Noriaki (Ryo Kase). Akiko is a call girl in Tokyo about to be sent out of town to spend the night with Takashi, an elderly, lonely and retired college professor (Tadashi Okuno). Takashi’s interest in her isn’t sexual, instead looking only for an evening of romance. But he doesn’t make that completely clear, and she falls asleep in his bed.
The next day, Noriaki mistakes Takashi to be Akiko’s grandfather and asks for his blessing in marriage. Suddenly the focus seems to shift to Noriaki and how he struggles to keep his fractured relationship built on lies together. He doesn’t know Akiko is a call girl, and when someone suggests that a photo in an ad looks a lot like her, he lashes out. He’s a scrawny kid capable of intense violence and anger.
Like Ozu, Kiarostami’s films have always been a modern example of deeply personal, slow cinema. And now this Iranian auteur completes his transformation by taking this trip to Japan for “Like Someone in Love.” Unlike his most recent masterpiece “Certified Copy,” Kiarostami is exploring mismatched relationships, philosophy and human nature not through a jumbled, experimental narrative, but a movie that bucks narrative altogether.
It is at times a maddeningly empty film. We sit and watch characters sleep in cars or wait on doorsteps, but Kiarostami surprises us with the new interactions and the new hints at backstory that come from nowhere, something that becomes even more obvious in the film’s captivating and undeniably abrupt ending.
One of the film’s finest scenes shows Akiko listening to voicemails in the backseat of a cab. They’re messages from her grandmother, who has come into town to see her but has been neglected and waiting all day. Now as Akiko is forcefully sent out on a job without time for her to rectify her mistake, we get an understanding of just how lonely her day has been. In her last message, she says she’ll wait patiently in front of a statue before the last train home departs. The cab circles a roundabout at the station at that moment, and there waiting under a streetlamp just as she said is a little old lady holding a suitcase. The image is sad enough, but Akiko asks the driver to go around once more so she can get another look.
It’s a heartbreaking moment, and one that just hints at the many flaws and depths of these characters. And yet it is perhaps a film I’ll have to see twice, one that is regrettably unclear about its intentions and its structure, requiring picking up on nuance on a second pass.
Perhaps that’s why Akiko asked to drive around again; we just need a better look.
3 stars
Reblogged this on The Sanity Clause and commented:
This is a repost of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film after I saw it and reviewed it in October at the Chicago Film Festival. It’s in limited release now. 3 stars