Looking and Seeing: LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

The great director Abbas Kiarostami uses his films to trace the most delicate of shifts in his character’s lives. Emotions sit tenderly on the surface of his imagery, at once staggeringly beautiful and completely ordinary. He’s never been a plot heavy director, all the better to create scenarios that breathe, characters that come alive. You don’t realize how little most films get up to until you see how much Kiarostami can do with the sparsest of stories. His last feature, 2011’s Certified Copy, his first shot outside his native Iran, consisted of little more than two great actors having a conversation in a picturesque Italian village. And it was one of the most fully realized relationship dramas of recent years, with one of the trickiest, slipperiest plots. Even Close-Up, his great 1990 picture set in his home country, with its instantly grabbing based-on-a-true-story story about a man who fooled a family into thinking he was a famous director, is rich in suggestion, small gestures with big meaning, exquisite frames with still, simple splendor telling so much.

And so, if Like Someone in Love had been written and directed by anyone else, the rough outline of its plot would seem like the stuff of broad farce or melodrama. Perhaps such an approach would be equally fruitful, but Kiarostami brings to this story his patience, his considered intelligence permeating every frame and every cut. The movie follows a young woman (Rin Takanashi) in Tokyo whose part-time job as a high-class escort takes her to the apartment of an elderly widower professor (Tadashi Okuno) who wants some company. Soon, he finds himself drawn into a grandfatherly position regarding the young woman’s relationship. Complications arise from there, but Kiarostami isn’t interested in building a plot machine. Audiences expecting the story to develop to a conventional climax and dénouement will no doubt leave disappointed. Kiarostami looks at his characters and their situations with a calm surface and intensity of interest, finding great power in subtly drawing attention deeply into the compositions, and deeper into the rhythms of his characters’ thoughts, feelings, and lives.

Take the virtuoso and much praised opening scene. It’s a shot of a busy bar. We hear a conversation on the soundtrack, but none of the people milling about appear to match the dialogue. After several minutes, a reverse shot finally lets us see Takanashi. She was behind our vantage point, talking this entire time. We’ve heard so much from her, but only now do we get to put a face to the voice. The direction has the capacity to draw you into a mystery so simple that it’s hard sometimes to realize how complex it is. What does it mean to know another person? Kiarostami has us looking intently in Katsumi Yanagijima’s cinematography for information, knowing that the power of cinema sits not only in what we see and hear, but in the absence of information as well.

He keeps up this strategy of keeping details and actors off screen. The young woman has a grandmother who appears only in voicemails that she plays while in the cab on the way to her client for the night. The camera sits on Takanashi’s face as the anxiously optimistic grandmotherly voice fills the soundtrack. The neon lights of the city cast a lovely, shifting glow on the windows that dances across her as she listens to the old woman sweetly, invitingly implore for a meeting. Her grandmother says she’ll be waiting in a plaza in a certain part of town and would love to see her. We get the feeling the young woman hasn’t seen her grandmother in a very long time, and the grandmother doesn’t know what the young woman does to make ends meet. The cab passes by the proposed meeting spot. I felt myself straining to see if the grandmother was there. I dare not say more about that moment. The film is built out of such searching ambiguities, inviting you to search the frame, study the precision performances, lose yourself in the beauty of the picture and the depth of the feeling. It wants you to see for yourself.

The young woman is in a period of transition, literally alternating between stasis and movement as the film progresses. She’s in vehicles and rooms, both pinned down in Kiarostami’s style. Even when she’s on the move, she’s stuck. As her connection with her client evolves, we learn about his life and hers. In conversation, we hear about them as they maneuver around each other. When the film follows them out into the light of day, as their situation complicates, the studied intricacy of Kiarostami’s point of view is so fine tuned that we don’t get a romance or a tragedy or any developments a more conventional film of Hollywood or art house persuasion would lead you to expect.

What Kiarostami is up to here is a tender character study that never erupts into anything as disruptive as typical narrative demands. It’s a work of style and performance that’s aching with compassion for all involved, charting shifts and incidents so slight and yet so impactful. He’s stripped away all the frippery and drama that could easily be built up around this scenario, the better to go digging around in the most elemental of questions about knowledge of self and of others. We spend our lives interacting with other people. If we’re lucky, we make truly meaningful connections. But what do we know of others? For that matter, what do we know of ourselves? What is the difference between being in love and behaving like someone in love? How much can we really know just by observing those we come in contact with?

Throughout Like Someone in Love, characters go about their daily lives. What we see is not especially notable, at least at first. Through their routines we struggle to make sense of what others know about them. As their situation develops, they struggle with how much to let on, what shadings and half-truths to apply as they relate to one another. Kiarostami makes a film that literalizes its theme in the structure and style by leaving information dangling, eliding some moments with artful cuts and stretching others in something like real time, and ultimately starting the end credits just as the plot is at is most overtly startling. He lets us look and see, but asks us to work with our observations to understand. And even then, he asks how much we really know. The uncertainty the film leaves the audience is simply the uncertainty of life. We think we know these people because we’ve seen a couple hours of their lives. But how much do we understand? And what happens next? We don’t know any more than the characters do.

Reflections: CERTIFIED COPY

Abbas Kiarostami, an acclaimed Iranian filmmaker who has made his first film in Europe with Certified Copy, has made a film so deceptively straightforward that by the time you realize you’ve been led into an intellectual hall of mirrors, it’s easy to take it in stride. Two characters drive through the Italian countryside. We think we know them. We meet them. We’re drawn into their lives as they while away the gorgeous afternoon hours together. We spend time with them. But, wait a minute. Who are they? What clues from how they interact can add up into a larger assumption? What’s ultimately puzzling about the movie is what’s so thrilling about it. It artfully deconstructs the very nature of fictional filmmaking. What is it that makes actors performing a scenario, if convincing enough, relatable on a human level? On occasion, it’s even easier to relate, to sympathize, to feel for what is ultimately nothing more than a facsimile, an approximation, a copy of human existence. Certified Copy has the simple formal audacity to ask this question through the story of two people who are implicitly giving themselves the exact same queries. Or are they? Ah, that’s the trick.

It all starts at a reading a professor (William Shimell) gives on his new book. His academic work is an inquiry into the value of reproductions, copies of artwork. If the copy can provoke the same emotional or intellectual response as the authentic original, is the reproduction not itself some kind of art? A woman (Juliette Binoche) and a young boy (Adrian Moore) move towards the front of the room. We cut away from the scholar behind his lectern and watch as they try to settle in. She takes a seat in the front row. The boy is restless, trying to get her attention. What does the man, droning on unseen, do in reaction to this potential distraction unfolding right in front of him? Kiarostami doesn’t cut back. He withholds information about the relationships between actions in the room. The woman and the boy silently communicate while the words that the man is speaking fill the soundtrack. Two mundane moments joined in one fictional scene, and yet the context of the opening scene of a movie by a major filmmaker elevates it to a level of curiosity and inquiry. It’s a copy of real life that achieves a power different from than the original.

Later that day the woman and the man meet and go for a drive. They’re just meeting. At least I thought they were, at first. After all, the film has just begun. The audience has just met the characters. There is no exposition that would lead us to believe they know each other. But as their afternoon goes on, their intellectual conversation grows personal. A waitress mistakes them for husband and wife. But is it a mistake? The woman goes along with it. Conversations circle around, in three languages, effortlessly no less, devouring themselves, covering the same ground or moving on. Discrepancies appear, or do they? The man and the woman test and provoke one another, question, ramble, and flirt. Dialogue becomes monologue and back again. They could very well be a couple, married or lovers, or perhaps they had a relationship that has gone cold, or ended. They could be trying out personas to spice things up or rekindle lost feelings. They could just as easily be strangers playacting a relationship, feeling the waters, testing the limits of the value of a copy, living his thesis.

I have seen the film several times and just when I think I’m close to pinning down an interpretation the film slips away. And yet rather than leave me frustrated, it leaves me invigorated. I want to dive back into the film and spend time with these characters once more, to find the explanation that works best for me this time, an explanation that will undoubtedly be as satisfying and as filled with nagging threads of doubt as each time before. (The strangest interpretation I’ve read proposed time travel to explain away the narrative and thematic wrinkles. I don’t buy it. And yet I can’t deny that I won’t bring myself to discard it entirely either.)

There’s a moment when the man and the woman stop off at a church and we see a bride preparing herself to appear for the cameras and spectators as if she feels the emotion of the moment. But what does she really feel? What is the emotion of the moment for her? Because we see her prepare, we’re let in on the secret. Surely there must be such an answer for this man and woman, too. Is showing an emotion the same as revealing it? Does it even matter when it provokes the same response to an observer, to a camera, to an audience? In the case of this couple, they’re playing to an audience of one, each other. This is a film of reflections, windows and mirrors prominently placed in the frame, endlessly doubling the details or allowing for deep introspection.

That the central relationship of the film remains an utter enigma throughout does not rob the film of emotional power. On the contrary, it opens up rich avenues of exploration. To call it a simple puzzle or a gimmick would be simply unfair. This is a film that could easily be viewed as simply waves of confident befuddlement, just as easily as some could reject it outright as too simple or obtuse. But Binoche and Shimell imbue their characters with such rich humanity and complicated, powerful interior lives and Kiarostami films them with such patience and care that I find it impossible to resist. It’s a film of intellectual and emotional envelopment, a pleasure of the highest order. Who are these people, these cinematic copies of the real thing, and why does filmmaking have the power to make me care so deeply so quickly, even knowing that I’ll never truly know them? They remain fixed there on the screen; they won’t change, only my reactions to them will. With a wondrously delicate dance of the emotional and intellectual, Kiarostami makes art out of artifice even as he asks if that’s even possible. In different moments of the film, the man and the woman each spend time staring into a mirror, but the camera stands in its place so that they are essentially looking into the audience to see what is reflected there.