Cine Me

 

Like Someone in Love


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1843287/

 

 

A drama telling the story of a young Japanese woman who finances her studies through prostitution.

 

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.

 

It’s a simple story with deep implications, starting with the ones contained in the very title of the film (that of a classic Hollywood song by Jimmy van Heusen and Johnny Burke). Throughout his career, Kiarostami has intertwined appearance and being, has filmed performance and impersonation as the very essence of character; in this film, even more than ever, he links the look of a person, a thing, a city, to the very heart of existence. It’s a thing of beauty with a heart of darkness; the surfaces have never been so alluring, so enticing, so literally lovely. Yet the world he depicts is one of surveillance and fear, coercion and rejection, pain and renunciation, danger and violence.

 

As in many of Kiarostami’s films, much of the action takes place in cars. Two rides in particular stand out as sequences of an astonishing beauty and depth. In the first, Akiko, packed off in a taxi by her john, has been avoiding her grandmother’s telephone calls; the old woman is in Tokyo just for the day. In the taxi, Akiko listens to all the messages and hears that her grandmother will be waiting outdoors beside a statue outside the train station. Akiko asks the cab driver to pass by the station. As the statue comes into view, a van pulls up and blocks the way. Akiko asks to be driven around it once more. The entire trajectory—showing Akiko and the driver, the face of the city from her perspective, and views of her from through the window—is a bravura eleven-minute sequence that seems to embrace the whole city and to capture a grand swirl of passion in a single, flickering, intimate experience. The entire tumult, busy yet delicate, power-riddled yet serene, cold and turbulent yet painterly-delightful, comes alive in a simply filmed and majestically conceived sequence.

 

The one that follows—the morning after, when Takashi drives Akiko to school—is much shorter, even simpler, yet even more virtuosic. It’s one of the most quietly delirious scenes in recent cinema, showing the sky and the clouds and the sinuously curving forms of the bland suburban overpasses reflected in his car’s windshield. The effect is one of Shakespearean grandeur, of a world out of joint, seeming literally to be spinning off its axis as this uneasy pair, who are far from a couple, find themselves thrown together, making their way together, in ways that neither of them can yet suspect. It’s hard to recall any scene, ever, in which such vast, cosmic emotions arise from a scene of little action and virtually no drama.

 

Miraculously, things turn out just as they appear to be—every suspicion is justified, every lead bears fruit, every worry leads to calamity—and this litany of anguish leads to the movie’s rapturous emotional center: namely, Kiarostami’s hard, grand idea of what it is to be like someone in love. It’s to bear up, to do whatever is necessary to keep a connection, to endure what must be borne, and, at any price, to maintain it. Along with Kiarostami’s images, his wisdom—his experience—will endure, burned into memory; he offers not just images of characters or of action but of life, of life as such. His immediate and instant fusion of philosophical thought, intimate detail, and the very act of cinematic vision makes this film one of his very greatest, certainly among the singular and crucial movies of recent years. (I’d rank it even higher than his 2010 film “Certified Copy.”)

Abbas Kiarostami can sometimes create challenging endings. The sign-off to his masterpiece A Taste of Cherry is still something to be pondered. But his latest movie, set in Tokyo, really is bafflingly and even exasperatingly truncated. There are some interesting ideas and sympathetic performances in a superbly shot and fascinatingly controlled exercise. There is potential. But the curtain comes down with an arbitrary crash just as the drama was becoming interesting.

 

But this is all taken away from us. The movie is cut off so sharply, I almost wondered if, like Tarantino's Kill Bill, there is some second part still to come. The enigma of its sudden stop doesn't seem, on the face of it, to be a particularly rewarding one. It is just opaque. When Akiko arrives in his apartment, Takashi is playing Ella Fitzgerald's recording of the song Like Someone in Love, by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke. But is he in love? Is she? These ideas are not explored. It is a beautifully shot, and very nicely acted beginning to something: but finally frustrating.

 

I enjoyed this intelligent, thought-provoking movie.

 

(The film is so masterfully controlled, we feel like we’ve eavesdropped on something like life.)