Like Some­one in Love

With Like Some­one in Love, Iran­ian mae­stro Abbas Kiarosta­mi heads to Japan, shoot­ing a Japan­ese-lan­guage film in and around Tokyo. Yet his the­mat­ic con­cerns and aes­thet­ic meth­ods have scarce­ly changed. As in his pre­vi­ous film, Cer­ti­fied Copy, the slip­per­i­ness of iden­ti­ty remains the cen­tral ques­tion, while his bat­tle-test­ed process of focus­ing on peo­ple talk­ing in iso­lat­ed spaces – par­tic­u­lar­ly cars – remains as oper­a­tive as ever.

But while his pre­vi­ous work occa­sion­al­ly took a look beyond the auto glass to explore the rich ter­rain of his set­tings (nev­er more so than in his cel­e­brat­ed Kok­er Tril­o­gy), in this new work Kiarosta­mi presents Tokyo as a world seen in medi­at­ed snatch­es, a shim­mer­ing, dig­i­tal­ly ren­dered land­scape that’s always just out of reach.

This sense of dis­em­bod­i­ment is estab­lished in the first scene when a voice talk­ing into a mobile phone at a café is giv­en no dis­cernible visu­al source. As we scan the screen to make out who is talk­ing, we come up emp­ty until Kiarosta­mi cuts away to show the voice ema­nat­ing from beyond the orig­i­nal frame of ref­er­ence. The per­son talk­ing is Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a stu­dent and pros­ti­tute explain­ing to her jeal­ous boyfriend Nori­a­ki (Ryo Kase) why she can’t see him that evening.

In fact, Akiko has a job which forces her to blow off not only her boyfriend but her vis­it­ing grand­moth­er and take a cab ride an hour out­side the city to enter­tain an elder­ly gen­tle­men client.

That man turns out to be a retired pro­fes­sor named Takashi (Takashi Okuno), with whom Akiko doesn’t sleep, but who takes a kind­ly pater­nal inter­est in her, par­tic­u­lar­ly the next day as he dri­ves her to school only to encounter Nori­a­ki lurk­ing angri­ly out­side. While Takashi waits in his car as Akiko takes an exam, Nori­a­ki works his way into the vehi­cle, intro­duc­ing him­self as Akiko’s fiancé and tak­ing the old­er man for her grandfather.

Thus, Nori­a­ki quick­ly estab­lish­es roles for each of the two in regards to Akiko, both of which are clear­ly false. As the film moves for­ward, as Nori­a­ki and Akiko both ride along in Takashi’s car, the pro­fes­sor nei­ther con­firms nor denies his sta­tus as the young woman’s grand­fa­ther, leav­ing Nori­a­ki to project his own assump­tions onto the old­er man.

Shot in beau­ti­ful, if patent­ly arti­fi­cial dig­i­tal, con­fin­ing its char­ac­ters (and cam­era) to iso­lat­ed spaces and allow­ing each fig­ure to take on at least one fic­tion­al role, Kiarostami’s film presents a world in which peo­ple shut them­selves off to gen­uine inter­ac­tion, opt­ing instead for the­atre, whether it be in the form of pros­ti­tu­tion or sim­ply the put-on pub­lic selves that they present to the world.

This leads to moments of extreme dis­en­gage­ment, such as in the film’s sad­dest moment, with Akiko’s grand­moth­er glimpsed wait­ing help­less­ly, vain­ly, in a city square through a taxi­cab win­dow. But it still allows for, via the bud­ding friend­ship between Takashi and Akiko, a chance for a more mean­ing­ful connection.

Still, any such steps are ten­ta­tive; in the iso­lat­ing, sim­u­lat­ed world of Like Some­one In Love, no emo­tion proves to be more authen­tic than the unquench­able rage of a dis­turbed and deeply vio­lent young man.