Like Someone in Love

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.

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.

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.

This is one of the very few good films I have watched in a while. This film is criticised for being simple, but Kiarostami's craft is almost flawless and very realistic. There are times when I questioned the duration of real-time in the film as he opt not to use jump cuts to show the shift in time, but except that minor glitch, this film was highly tense, deep and meaningful at so many levels.

Unlike the superficial Hollywood garbage we get to see everyday, Kiarostami's films show us real people with real problems. Probably one of the very few directors who can claim to have real class in this present era. I started watching this film after reading an interview with the director. The film did not disappoint me even a little bit. I am ashamed that I did not come across his name before.

I watched this movie on silver screen twice up to now and I'm sure I can check it out ten more times and still enjoy it. It's definitely a minimal piece of art but it's as deep as life. It looks simple but it doesn't mean you can't elaborate. Kiarostami highlights lifelike stories. Stories which belong to us, ordinary people! Aren't they important? And Kiarostami doesn't conceal this fact that he likes Haiku and Japanese culture but he doesn't have any idea how this feelings came up to him. He started writing poems that resembled Haiku when he was just 20! The serene, nonchalant, and often profoundly philosophical language of haiku allows the poet to swiftly touch on the core of the universal human condition: love, despair, humor, death; as his movies do and now Kiarostami made his last movie (and one of the best ones) where Haiku was blossomed: Japan. All these said, I can't ignore the innovative cinematographic techniques he used in "Like Someone in Love" that adds to the beauty of this movie. Remember the first scene in the bar with Camera fixed on a table, the girl is talking in behind while we see other people activities. We don't know what we should track. The other scenes in the car which camera plays with lights and shadows are just magnificent. I'm really amazed how delicately he sets up these all. Every detail is deliberated. Briefly, if you are bored of the stupid stories we see in the movies nowadays and instead want to know what's behind go and check this out.