Like Someone in Love – review
Abbas Kiarostami's Tokyo-set Like Someone in Love is a strange, unfinished spectacle – a minor work but well acted and made with eerily deliberate poise
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Fri 21 Jun 2013 06.00 AEST
Peter Bradshaw, Catherine Shoard and Xan Brooks review Like Someone in Love
Abbas Kiarostami's new film is a strange, unfinished spectacle whose ending simply looks amputated – a "missing reel" effect.
Abbas Kiarostami's new film is a strange, unfinished spectacle whose ending simply looks amputated – a "missing reel" effect.
It's the second time I have seen it since its premiere at Cannes last year, and I was by turns intrigued, startled and sceptical in exactly the same way, although I have to concede its immersive brilliance, especially in its first two scenes. A film-maker such as Kiarostami deserves many considerations, and one of them is a repeat viewing, though a lesser director might be suspected of just having thought of a great beginning and middle of a conventional story, but failed to come up with an ending.
Rin Takanashi is Akiko, a beautiful young student working as an escort; Tadashi Okuno is a lonely, elderly academic, Takashi. Their paths cross; the story is tense, and then … Well, what an elegantly manicured garden path we are led up. Are there hints of what is to happen, or not happen? Akiko tells a joke, but doesn't finish it. Takashi mutters some lines of verse he has to translate, but not all of them. You might compare it to The Castle, the screen adaptation of Kafka's unfinished work by Michael Haneke, a famously passionate admirer of Kiarostami. Or perhaps Kiarostami's own masterpiece A Taste of Cherry, whose ending finally takes us over the cliff edge of narrative expectation, though in a more interesting, and heartstopping way. This is a minor work by Kiarostami, but well acted and made with eerily deliberate poise.
Rin Takanashi is Akiko, a beautiful young student working as an escort; Tadashi Okuno is a lonely, elderly academic, Takashi. Their paths cross; the story is tense, and then … Well, what an elegantly manicured garden path we are led up. Are there hints of what is to happen, or not happen? Akiko tells a joke, but doesn't finish it. Takashi mutters some lines of verse he has to translate, but not all of them. You might compare it to The Castle, the screen adaptation of Kafka's unfinished work by Michael Haneke, a famously passionate admirer of Kiarostami. Or perhaps Kiarostami's own masterpiece A Taste of Cherry, whose ending finally takes us over the cliff edge of narrative expectation, though in a more interesting, and heartstopping way. This is a minor work by Kiarostami, but well acted and made with eerily deliberate poise.
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