Akiko is a sociology student in Tokyo who moonlights as an elite prostitute. One evening, the pimp sends her to his longtime friend Takashi, a retired writer and university professor. Instead of having sex, they discuss their families, discovering a lot in common. But the idyll collapses the next day when Takashi, who drives the girl to the exam, intersects with her jealous boyfriend Noriaki and is forced to pretend to be her granddad. Kiarostami’s second feature film shot outside Iran, and his last lifetime film was premiered at the 2012 Cannes Festival. Garage Screen presents the Russian premiere of the restored version of the picture.
Like the experimental Five (2003), Like Someone in Love is an homage to the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, only this time not so much at the formal level (meditative sea scenes) as at the level of meaning (the theme of relations between generations). This is also somewhat a sisterly continuation of Kiarostami’s previous international film, Certified Copy (2010), where the protagonists once again pretend to be who they are not. Newcomer Akiko feels alone in the big city, controlled, on the one hand, by the souteneur, and on the other, by her boyfriend, jealous enough to make her count the tiles on the bathroom floor in a café and then check whether she lied to him or not. Ashamed of her occupation, she wishes but cannot afford to meet with her grandmother, who came to visit her, reducing the former’s presence in the film to messages on an answering machine. This is why Takashi, who discusses art, everyday stuff, and Durkheim with Akiko, becomes her the closest person and father figure for a short while.
Half of the film is set in cars, their glass distorting Tokyo into a maze of signs, overpasses, houses, and wires. Hypnotic, viscous reflections on the windshield and side windows now and then plunge the heroes into sleep: Akiko falls asleep in the back seat of a taxi, Takashi—in the driver’s seat. The hermetic spaces of cars, bars, and apartments seem to act as metaphors of fiction, that is, fictitious relations conditioned by a monetary contract. Beyond them lies the dangerous outside world, which Takashi knows very well as the author of a recent book on social violence. Like the protagonist in Certified Copy, the writer James Miller, Takashi will have to encounter his real-life theory. In a sense, “like someone in love” defines not the characters alone, fascinated by fiction, but also the director himself, fascinated by the art of cinema, hence the sad irony in the fact that his last feature, resembling a girl’s dream in the back seat of a car, ends with awakening.
The film will be screened in Japanese with Russian subtitles.
Like Someone in Love
Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
Japan, France, 2012. 109 min. 16+