Review: Like Someone In Love (2012)

Cast: Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Ryo Kase
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Country: France | Japan
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: Like Someone In Love was limited released in cinemas Friday February 15th.

Toward the end of Like Someone in Love, an elderly academic hears word that the first printing of his book is missing a sentence. As viewers of an Abbas Kiarostami film, we know the feeling. Anyone who’s seen a movie by the titan of Iranian cinema has felt, at one point or another, like a key scene or line of dialogue — one that’d make the whole thing make more sense — just up and disappeared. Kiarostami has said he strives to make “incomplete” films, ones that force us viewers to find (or create) the missing puzzle pieces. Few of his films have ever felt as incomplete as Like Someone in Love.

…Kiarostami has said he strives to make “incomplete” films, ones that force us viewers to find (or create) the missing puzzle pieces. Few of his films have ever felt as incomplete as Like Someone in Love.

The film marks Kiarostami’s first feature in Japanese and his second outside Iran, following Certified Copy. That film’s teasing ambiguities and romantic core helped it find an unprecedented audience for Kiarostami. To be sure, Like Someone in Love won’t enjoy a repeat of that film’s commercial success. A difficult work from the master of minimalism, Like Someone in Love offers plenty to study and admire but little to attract a non-cineaste. Its pleasures derive almost exclusively from how Kiarostami toys with the medium.

The film’s threadbare narrative concerns Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman in Tokyo who finances her tuition through prostitution. One night, while fielding phone calls from her hyper-jealous fiancé, Akiko gets an assignment from her pimp to visit Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), a retired academic who lives an hour away. Kiarostami introduces Akiko through the first of many masterful uses of off-screen sound. We see a bar full of young, sprightly drinkers and hear Akiko’s voice. Is this voiceover, we wonder? If so, whose voice? One of the many women in the frame? Kiarostami lets those questions swirl before he cuts to reveal a young woman at the bar, isolated and on the phone. The previous shot, we deduce, was her point of view. She watches the carefree courtship of others while dealing with her own messy entanglement. Throughout Like Someone in Love, Kiarostami will maintain this death-like grip of what we see and hear. Every cut, every move of the camera, every sound heard off camera will carry weight.

Akiko spills into a cab and heads toward Takashi’s home. En route, she listens to a string of increasingly pitiful voicemails from her grandmother, who’s in town and would like to meet. In the last voicemail, her grandmother tells Akiko that she’ll be standing near a particular monument and wait for her. Akiko has the cab driver circle around to get a glimpse of her grandmother, bundled up and waiting in the night. Akiko doesn’t have the time to say hello; she cries as the car drives away.

Something about this particular cocktail of sound and image — Tokyo’s streaking lights, Akiko’s tortured face, her grandmother’s quietly desperate voicemails — hits a note of profound sadness. Isolated, the scene could stand as an experimental short, one very similar to Kiarostami’s entry for the Lumière and Company project. As he did there, he pairs hypnotic visuals with a strained voicemail and lets the two elements volley back and forth and create meaning in our minds.

What this narrative means is anyone’s guess. Kiarostami litters the work with detectible subtext, though, true to his form, the film itself remains very difficult to encapsulate in a single sentence.

Akiko is a new woman when she arrives at Takashi’s apartment: lively, eager to tell stories of her youth and invite the old man to bed. Takashi has other plans; he lights candles, turns on some Ella Fitzgerald, and presents her with a dish he (wrongly) thinks she’ll enjoy for dinner. He acts, in other words, like someone in love. Here, and throughout the film, identities remain as fluid as the camera’s ever-shifting point of view. How else to explain Akiko’s temperamental u-turn, from despair in the bar and cab to playful at Takashi’s home? Later, Takashi will pretend to be Akiko’s grandfather, Akiko will discuss how people often confuse her for other women, and she’ll pretend she isn’t a call girl before her unhinged fiancée Noriaki (Ryo Kase). As in Certified Copy, the leads in Like Someone in Love are slippery, unclassifiable figures.

Taking its sweet time, the film lurches toward a narrative about Akiko and her relationship with these two men.

What this narrative means is anyone’s guess. Kiarostami litters the work with detectible subtext, though, true to his form, the film itself remains very difficult to encapsulate in a single sentence. The men of Like Someone in Love embody different traits of the heterosexual male in love: Takashi offers courtship and companionship; Noriaki offers paternalism and controlling jealousy. Together, they form a rather ugly portrait of masculinity and the male desire to control women’s lives. Several similar threads run through the film — most notably, the idea of cultural difference and translation, Kiarostami being an Iranian man filming in a language not his own — but I’d hesitate to say the film is about any one of these themes in particular.

Like Someone in Love also has a clear fascination with off-screen voices and subtle shifts in point of view. Voicemails and speakerphone conversations mediate many but not all of these interactions. Kiarostami introduces Takashi’s prying neighbor, for example, with a disorienting point-of-view sequence that leaves her off camera for the entire scene. The sequence opens with an image of Takashi emerging from his car, the camera placed behind a nearby window. We soon hear an unfamiliar voice and see Takashi turn to look toward the camera in response. Kiarostami has placed us in the neighbor’s point of view for the whole scene, despite having never even introduced us to her. Later, when the neighbor starts a conversation with Akiko, their exchange begins the same way and then cuts to reveal the neighbor’s face. In a film of such aesthetic minimalism, the shift between how Kiarostami shoots these two scenes feels seismic.

Like the floating voices that haunt the film, however, any tangible meaning Like Someone in Love might have remains just outside the frame. Kiarostami provides the skeleton of a dramatic feature and rather intentionally leaves us to put the meat on its bones. Such an approach, which asks a great deal of the audience, will alienate most viewers from the very first shot. Lovers of cinematic minimalism, meanwhile, can gorge on the acquired taste of off-screen sound, long takes, and elliptical storytelling. Despite its many aesthetic pleasures, Like Someone in Love’s formal mastery can’t quite conceal its lack of dramatic sustenance.

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Soheil Rezayazdi

I’m a communications officer at a nonprofit advocacy organization in New York City. At work, I pay OCD-like attention to words, images, and the impressions they leave. After hours, I watch directors do the same on celluloid and digital video. Cinema is the most effective natural stimulant I know.

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