Like Someone in Love

In Tokyo, a young prostitute (Rin Takanashi) develops an unexpected connection with a widower (Tadashi Okuno) over a period of two days.

At this point in his career, Abbas Kiarostami had been directing films for forty years, so he is no amateur. But it might be a bit of a new beginning, filming in Tokyo with an all-Japanese cast. In fact, had one not known better, they might assume the director was Japanese. What do these two worldviews create when blended?

Professor Nico Baumbach makes much of this cultural difference (and rightfully so), saying Kiarostami's foreign immersion "heightens in a new way the sense of the filmmaker as spectator", but is then quick to point out that despite this, we are not alienated from our subjects. The experience of distance "becomes the condition for an emotional connection that otherwise would not have been possible."

The film is also, in short, beautifully shot, with glorious cinematography. This is the sort of film, with its style and charismatic lead actress that one could watch for hours regardless of plot or substance. Critic David Denby says it more eloquently when he writes, "The cinematography is clear and hard-focused, and the editing produces long, flowing passages. This exquisitely made, elusive film has a lulling rhythm and a melancholy charm."

The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made "Like Someone In Love" in Japan but it could have been set anywhere for this is a film that knows no boundaries or borders. As you would expect from Kiarostami it's brilliantly written and directed and beautifully played, particularly by Tadashi Okuno as an old professor whose loneliness draws him to a young student supplementing her income by working as an escort. He's not looking for sex, just conversation and company and when, the next day, they run into her jealous boyfriend the old man allows himself to be mistaken for her grandfather ... and then the boy finds out the truth.

It's a film of mostly small dramas and when violence finally erupts Kiarostami keeps it off screen. For the most part these people simply talk, about their problems, their relationships and life itself and Kiarostami films sequences in 'real time' and with a fixed camera just as he does in his Iranian films. I found it mesmerizing, at times funny, sometimes moving and in the end, really rather shocking. It makes for essential viewing.

This is a film that from the get-go grabs your interest. It has a unique story, a stylish look and some saddening, emotional moments from it's very beginning that really get you invested in it. A student with a working-class and jealous fiance jilts both him and her concerned family to work secretly as a call girl with her best friend Nagisa. An elderly widower who hires her to talk to him eventually befriends her and becomes more and more involved in her life.

There's so much potential here and as I said, it really hooks you from the get-go in every way. Unfortunately, I felt like I enjoyed parts of this film despite Abbas Kiarostami's direction, rather than because of it. The plot is intriguing (if a bit underdeveloped), the characters and their dynamics are really interesting and the acting is well done all-around. Pretty colours, interesting cinematography too. But jesus, the director really manages to test your patience and turn all of these elements from the genre of dramatic film into the one of tedium and high-level boredom.

I'm sure many would call me uncultured for this, but I really don't see what a five-minute shot of an old man sleeping in his car adds to anything, other than the running time. It's infuriating, because you start to care about the characters and the story and then gradually your thoughts turn to contemplating fast-forwarding or turning the whole damn thing off. Stupid, pointless scenes such as a man realising he's parked on the street so he has to turn his car all the way around. No cutting - of course not - because this director considers himself an 'artisté' and has to show you the entire motion of a guy parking, unparking and driving in a circle in order to park his car someplace else. But hey, maybe it's a metaphor. I'll be sure to call my old English Lit teacher and ask them for the deeper meaning. In the meantime, I was bored to death.

I was going to say that ultimately, the one thing this film did was show me that you can actually enjoy a film even when it frustrates you persistently throughout. But with the way it ends - abruptly, very rushed and without any kind of deep meaning or interesting takes or anything at all, and taking so long to get there - I couldn't even say that.

The most frustrating thing is that if you cut out all the unnecessary chaff, you could have filled the gaps in this film and made it a truly great movie. Develop the main characters a bit more, follow through their quarrels and moral conundrums, give us something to think about instead of pushing ideas into frame and then fading them back out undeveloped, never to be seen again. Unfortunately, this film is instead full of gratuitous scenes only the director himself and armchair cinephiles could really enjoy. A shame, and a real waste from what could have been.

I really wanted to like this one. But I couldn't.

Kiarostami in Japan, what bliss and promise! I'm always interested when foreign filmmakers film in Japan, how that worldview illuminates them. Chris Marker captured the most evocative coming and going of things in Sans Soleil, on the flipside for me is Wenders who completely misses Zen in his film about Ozu, mistaking emptiness for modern lack. Coppola's is merely passable for my taste.

But Kiarostami is not merely drawn to images, his whole world conveys a Persian Zen of sorts—his Wind was the most clear, all about finding meaning in things and their cyclical drift being what they are. Certified Copy added more story, but the fact remained of his being the most essentially Buddhist filmmaker in the West since Antonioni, drawing up the same realizations about self and time.

So what does he find here, what illumination?

There are three main implications woven together, all derived from a Buddhist view; the transience of things, with people coming and going at the bar before the girl, the taxi drive with Tokyo nightlife fleeing past, circling around the grandmother but driving on without stopping; illusory self, we are not sure at first who the girl or the old man are, no fixed roles but two people in each other's company, the resemblance to the girls in the painting and photograph, the old man posing as the grandfather later in the car and her flyer that comes up, all pointing to the fluidity of self; ignorance born from desire in the fiancé with his phonecalls and later showing up on the door.

Kiarostami captures the essence of Buddhism, not interpreting themes but unearthing the visual flow from ordinary life. He films the air of anticipation, the cautious exchange. True to Japan, he films the drama with no needless suffering, as awareness, with that faint melancholy they know over there as mono no aware, which comes from a notion of time where things are not inevitable as we understand in the West when we talk about fate, nor could they be anything else than what's before the eyes.

What will be will be, says the old man who poses as the grandfather to both protect the girl and conceal his misdeed. We have this wonderful ambiguity all through the thing. There is no problem of evil see in Buddhism and Kiarostami's cinema alike. No moral blame in that the girl does what she does to go through college and ignores her grandma, or that the old man desired the company of someone like her that night or even that he lies about being the grandfather.

But when what will be is finally at hand and the old man looks confused and foolish as he faces a beating, what's the good of all the philosophizing then? But that's when Kiarostami abandons the story, probably thinking he has evoked enough and we should mull over the rest.

I consider this a real miss, a poor ending. We don't need any concrete answer of course. It's just that ending it at that point in the story, with the karmic noise but not the echo back into life, we forget all about the girl, the sweet fragile self who is not the dolled-up face in the flyer, we forget about the waiting grandmother, it's all cleaved away from the film.

Like Someone in Love (2012) is a Japanese movie written and directed by the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Kiarostami brings his quiet, thoughtful style to a culture that is surely very alien to him. Japanese viewers may note cultural errors in the movie. My thought is that Kiarostami can look beyond cultural differences to universal themes.

The movie, set in Tokyo, stars Rin Takanashi as Akiko, a young provincial woman who is a call girl. (She doesn't walk the streets. She works out of a bar, whose owner arranges the sessions at people's homes.) As the movie opens Akiko is facing two immediate problems. Her jealous boyfriend is on the phone, demanding to know where she is. Akiko is a college student, and her boyfriend is aware of that. He doesn't know that she's a prostitute, but he can sense that something isn't right, and he suspects her of cheating.

Akiko's grandmother is visiting Tokyo that day, and desperately wants to see Akiko. Akiko would love to meet with her, but the bar owner is adamant--she must go out on a call to an important client. The client is Professor Takashi Watanabe, played by Tadasi Okuno. Akiko has no choice but to ignore her grandmother and visit the professor's apartment.

Prof. Watanabe is a gentle, lonely widower. He has prepared a special dinner for Akiko, and he's playing Western music. (It's Ella Fitzgerald singing "Like Someone in Love.") It's more like a seduction scene than a paid sexual encounter.

Akiko spends the night at the professor's home, and he drives her to the university the next morning. It's at that point that the film takes a different turn, because Akiko's violent boyfriend confronts her on the university steps.

All of this action takes place in the first third of the movie. In the remainder of the film, Kiarostami continues to explore this unusual and somewhat threatening love triangle. This interaction among three very different individuals provides a fascinating look into human relationships. Where these relationships will lead isn't always obvious or predictable.

I enjoyed this intelligent, thought-provoking movie. It will work well on DVD. It's worth seeking out and watching.