Abbas Kiarostami (2012)
Reading the writer-director Abbas Kiarostami’s Sight and Sound interview with Geoff Andrew in the BFI programme note was more interesting than watching the film. What Kiarostami says in the interview is sometimes puzzling, though. He distinguishes ‘being in love’ from ‘like being in love’; says the movie is about the latter rather than the former; but then goes on to say that love is ‘relative and we mean different things by it’. So why can’t this film just be about people who are in love but for whom that means different things? There are three main characters in Like Someone in Love, which is set in Tokyo. Akiko is a sociology student by day and high-end prostitute by night. Takashi, a retired university professor, hires Akiko for the evening but is interested in making dinner and having a conversation, rather than sex. Noriaki, Akiko’s jealous, hot-tempered boyfriend, owns a local garage. Although none of the three principals is as irritating as the woman playing Takashi’s yattering and lonely nosy neighbour – this part is relatively overwritten, in how the woman explains her life and relationship with the old man – Rin Takanashi as the mostly affectless Akiko sometimes runs her a close second. It’s striking that Kiarostami, in the S&S interview, praises Takanashi particularly: the quality he describes her as having in the film’s final scene – ‘she’s there but totally absent’ – seemed to me the same throughout.
The elderly man is meticulously played by Tadashi Okuno even though his painstaking accuracy is sometimes wearying. When Takashi drifts off to sleep, while his car is crawling through city centre traffic, the moment seems contrived but it still makes an impression. It thus epitomises the whole movie. The minute detail of what is shown on screen and the lack of conventional dramatic incident is a demanding combination yet there were several elements that kept me going (as well as feelings of guilt that I’ve walked out too much recently). I admired the film in several ways, though I longed for it to end. First, the quality of light and the immediacy of the images created by Kiarostami and the cinematographer Katsumi Yanagijima: these suggest real life in a way that feels dynamically close, even if most of the images show not much happening. Second, the camera’s interest in everyone it picks up, however fleetingly: it’s as if Kiarostami is suggesting that anyone is worthy of attention – that he just happens to have chosen certain individuals to focus on. Third, Ryo Kase, who plays the volatile boyfriend Noriaki – he’s hard to read at first but his emotional variety then becomes intriguing. Noriaki’s disappearance from the film is a loss and his eventual return is startling. And that links to the fourth impressive element – the ending of Like Someone in Love. There’s no denying that the lack of action gives the violent finale a shocking impact and is made more alarming because Kiarostami’s camera stays in Takashi’s apartment with him and Akiko and we hear, with them, the worrying noises from outside. In the final moment, the barrier between the two sides of the window is broken as something is thrown and shatters the glass and the old man falls to the floor. The film’s title is that of a Lerner and Loewe song, new to me, which is sung in the movie by Ella Fitzgerald, from a stereo in Takashi’s apartment and over the closing credits.
25 June 2013
