***½/****
starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Rio Kase, Denden
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami
by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your
guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It's clear
enough that Like
Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it's
harder to say at first what we're looking at and why. The closest voice we hear
belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who's a little too preoccupied with lying her way out
of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young
revellers in front of her. Whether she's our lead takes a couple of false tries
to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a
table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the
foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes
her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with
first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp
directing his employees. Somewhere in-between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who's even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of
vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used
to be after she's vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets
back.
You could read this opening game of musical
chairs as nothing but a cheeky bit of misdirection, or you could say that the
oblique set-up prepares us to accept misdirection as method. Like Certified Copy, its sister film in Kiarostami's oeuvre (sharing its two-hander
structure, its minimalist tone, and an international setting outside of his native
Iran), Like
Someone in Love has the sustained ambiguity of a
riddle. It's telling that the redhead's parting shot before she's replaced at
the table is a dirty joke that Akiko doesn't understand; she repeats it later for her new client, an elderly sociology professor named Takashi (Tadashi
Okuno) who's just as baffled by its meaning but better trained to laugh at
punchlines when he recognizes them. Like that joke, which hinges on a millipede's
ability to signify two things at once, the film speaks in the language of
games, expressing Kiarostami's curiosity about the way people assemble and
reassemble themselves in an instant depending on the rules of the conversation.
Where Certified Copy felt like a humanist riff on the modernist identity play of Last Year at Marienbad, Like
Someone in Love has Nabokov on its mind, filching Lolita's road narrative about inappropriate, age-disparate lovers and
bending it for the traffic jams and neon billboards of Tokyo. The visual
pairing of young Akiko with Takashi, who orders her extra-curricular services
for a night, recalls a less volatile version of the Humbert-Lolita dynamic. Like Humbert, Takashi is a translator with a penchant for wordplay. Although Akiko is a university student rather than a proper nymphet, her escort
work flirts with the same sort of transgression, as her jealous fiancé Noriaki
(Rio Kase) points out when a co-worker gives him a sex ad with an image of a
woman who bears a striking resemblance to her, done up in pigtails as if to
bait men of Humbert's persuasion. For his part, the skittish Noriaki isn't much
of a Quilty figure, dumbly mistaking Takashi for Akiko's grandfather at first
instead of seeing through the ruse of paternal affection, yet the threat of
sexual replacement by a double is more or less the same threat hanging over
Humbert, who likewise plies his paramour with consumable goods.
One doesn't want to push too hard on this
analogy. Suffice it to say that what seems to interest Kiarostami about Lolita is how its characters occupy multiple identities simultaneously,
with Humbert in particular oscillating between dissipated European academic,
fairytale ogre, and tragic prisoner at any given time. In this case, an old
scholar gets to play tender Lothario with a sleeping beauty in his bed one
night and doting grandfather on the
ride to school the next day. Akiko, meanwhile, shifts gears in that opening
scene from a demure fiancé on the phone to a sex-worker spending a late
night at the office, and later appears to relish a third role when she's mistaken
for Takashi's granddaughter by his nosy neighbour. Going through the motions of
the conversation makes it real.
The trick is that none of these identities are
treated as especially inauthentic. "I'm as much a grandfather to you
as I am to her," Takashi tells Noriaki, and though he's being ironic in
his private knowledge that "as much" means "not at all," he's
also sincere, happy to perform whatever part the moment requires. The final beats of the film, especially the abrupt last shot, would seem to cast that
fluid approach to identity in doubt, revealing it as untenable should others
refuse to play along. Here we're out of Kiarostami's amorphous world of
cityscapes distorted into new shapes by the reflective surfaces of windshields
and into something resembling fascism, where a fiancé is always a fiancé. The
temptation is to read that shift as a cheat, or at the very least a bitter joke
on these characters' inconstancy. But my sense is it's a bit more nuanced than
that: a pained recognition that like romantic pop songs (and movies),
playtime is precious precisely because it isn't built to last.
