Like Someone in Love

Abbas Kiarostami can frame actors. In what I’ll call the prologue of Like Someone in Love, he shoots a trio of bar patrons sitting and drinking as a voice, irritated but in control, drifts over them. But the speaker, Aikiko (Rin Takanashi), doesn’t appear until a couple of minutes later, and she’s not in the party: she’s been on the phone with what sounds like a jealous boyfriend. A friend joins her. I told him my grandmother’s in town, Aikiko explains. The friend rises and sits at a neighboring table upon the arrival of a gentleman old enough to be Aikiko’s father. Foregoing the lameness of expository dialogue, Kiarostami’s characters speak in the fragments and half truths of overheard chatter, which requires work; but it become clear that Aikiko is a call girl, persuaded by her pimp to accept an assignment outside Tokyo. When Kiarostami breaks the spell of medium shots and shoots the bar, we see the trio again and Aikiko’s friend laughing and smoking with a male friend stage right. Is she on assignment too? Is she there as part of Aikiko’s cover story in case her boyfriend appears?

The elliptical Kiarostami won’t answer these questions, but the suggestive power of this scene sends echoes through the rest of this 105-minute film, notably when the boyfriend enters the scene. Before, though, we enter Kiarostamiland, a place where men and women spend their most charged moments in cars traveling long distances. From the cab on the way to the john’s we learn Aikiko didn’t bullshit about the grandmother: we hear five of seven messages in which this scrupulously polite woman doesn’t lose her composure waiting for Aikiko at the train station. Neither does the john, a professor fielding calls from a less patient agent translating his book but apparently unsexed enough to offer Aikiko a candlelit dinner of “a soup with little shrimp” and sparkling wine. They do not sex — to our relief, for it’s clear their relationship from the outset is more fraught than expected.

Tadashi Okuno’s warm, skeptical wryness as Professor Takashi holds the movie together as Aikiko becomes less important than the cover stories she and he put out when upon dropping her off at the university the next day the boyfriend Noriaki invites himself along. He’s visiting his granddaughter, Takashi explains, with the faintest wink to the audience but uncaught by Noriaki (Ryo Kase), a gangly type whose capacity for violence, like Ray Liotta’s in Something Wild, is a smile away. The old man and the twentysomething collude in the fiction, exemplified by a witticism of Takashi’s: “When you know you may be lied to, it’s best not to ask questions. That’s what we learn from experience.” It explains the grandmother’s willingness to wait nine hours knowing full well that Aikiko lied about picking her up (a sequence steeped in melancholy, by the way, as the purple Tokyo sky and Aikiko’s tear-streaked face converge on a stooped figure viewed in long shot holding parcels under a statue, just as the grandmother said she would in her last phone message).

What happens next unfurls in Kiarostami’s teasing, circumstantial manner. Takashi needs a fan belt. An officious neighbor with a shrill voice claims to have once almost married Takashi and remarks on Aikiko’s resemblance to his late wife. Another marvelous shot: Aikiko, nursing a bloody nose, sits on a stoop protected on either side by brick walls. The lies crumble. The last shot is a stunner but not unexpected. I found Like Someone in Love a richer experience than Certified Copy, a movie I loved if tainted by Marienbad-isms. As a chronicler of felt life, Kiarostami is peerless.