Like Someone In Love

Synopsis: A young Tokyo college student, Akiko (Rin Takanashi), is working her way through college as an escort. She is pressured by her pimp to see a client (Tadashi Okuno), a retired professor , with whom she spends the night. The next morning he drives her to her campus where her jealous  boyfriend (Ryo Kase) wants to know who the old man is.

Many people breathed a sigh of relief with Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s last film, Certified Copy, a surprisingly conventional relationship drama set in Tuscany.  The same people are likely to be knocked off their perch somewhat by his latest film which, although set in Tokyo and entirely in Japanese,  is a substantial reversion to his characteristic stylings – elliptical encounters, long held scenes of banal goings-on, people in cars driving here and there, the prominent presence of off-camera ambient sound  - in a narrative with no clear beginning or end.  On the other hand those who like the director’s quasi-cinema verité style and cinéastes in general are going to love this film.

The opening scene which is set in a cramped restaurant is particularly wonderful, staged in such a way that sound and vision cut across each other, it taking a while for us to realize that the voice we are hearing is not that of the woman we see talking to her date but rather someone off-camera talking inot a mobile phone.  It is a brilliant metonym for the fractured, interpenetrating reality of urban life (the Italian Futurists would have loved the scene), a reality that keeps making its presence felt throughout the film.

Wisely, Kiarostami does not overdo the cleverness and after that the film settles into relatively straightforward mise-en-scène although never falling into the predictable.  Thus when Akiko arrives at the apartment of the old professor, Kiarostami  does not indulge in any Sleeping Beauty-style aestheticisation but rather focuses on the dynamic between the two before simply cutting to the next morning and shifting into a kind of comedy of mistaken identity.

I was reminded of Wong Kar-Wai’s marvelous film from some years back, the similarly titled In The Mood For Love for both films are about loneliness amidst the meaningless bustle of modern life. In comparison  Kiarostami’s film, which, quite impressively, he also wrote, does not provide so many immediate pleasures, indeed purposefully withholds them, but within the parameters of his oeuvre it is a particularly fine example of his distinctive craftsmanship.

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