Movie of the Week: LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)

Contrary to what the title suggests, and the fact that it’s Valentine’s Day, Kiarostami’s final fiction feature isn’t really romantic at all

If Terrence Malick is the filmmaker who first ignited my passion for movies when I was a teenager, Kiarostami is the one who forced me, in my early 20s, to reconsider what movies are — and in the process, made me fall even harder in love with them. As I was discovering his work, he taught me the invaluable lesson that true cinematic complexity often arises from the simplest of circumstances. This is of course most evident in his inexpensively made, quasi-neorealist Iranian films. Towards the end of his life, though, he capitalized on his international fame to mount cushier productions outside his native country. First there was Certified Copy (2010) in Italy with Juliette Binoche, followed by Like Someone in Love in Japan. What’s totally remarkable about both is that nothing is lost in translation. It must be said, however, that Like Someone in Love has a deceptively traditional story by Kiarostami’s standards. Akiko (Rin Takahashi) is a Tokyo sociology student who moonlights as a high-class escort. The problem is that her possessive and paranoid fiancé Noriaki (Ryo Kase) has no idea, and is definitely the kind of guy who wouldn’t take that revelation well. One night, Akiko’s pimp sets her up with the widowed, elderly professor Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), who’s less interested in going to bed with her than having good company for a home-cooked meal. But as Takashi catches wind of Akiko’s emotionally and physically abusive relationship, he transforms from client into kindly paternal figure, even posing as Akiko’s grandfather to steer the immature and unpredictable Noriaki away from marriage. While at first blush it may seem like Kiarostami is making an honest-to-goodness “international art film,” all his pet themes and concerns are here. We have, first and foremost, characters lying about who they are and “performing” roles within the narrative. We also have Kiarostami’s playful visual eye: in a movie where the truth is elusive, there are few shots in which the characters aren’t framed behind glass, in reflections, or are otherwise obscured. And then, of course, there’s the car stuff. Kiarostami has always been the screen’s foremost chronicler of humanity’s relationship to the automobile, and the road scenes in Like Someone in Love — especially the News from Home-inspired sequence where Akiko, seated in the back of a cab, listens to voicemails from her grandmother — live up to that standard. All told, this “simple” story filmed with supreme formal dexterity is one of Kiarostami’s most confounding movies, one in which the primary feature isn’t the “narrative,” per se, but an inescapable sense of mystery. Its bleak and abrupt ending only reinforces that, and serves as a fitting curtain to one of the medium’s most unique and important voices.

Streaming for free on Kanopy; available for rent on Apple TV, Amazon, and other major platforms.