alr

Like Someone In Love

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami and Banafsheh Violet Modaressi.
With Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Ryo Kase.
Japan/France, 2012, DCP, color, 109 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
DCP source: IFC

Setting his film in Japan partly because of the uniquely deep clash between tradition and modernity, Kiarostami picks up many of the strands he started in Certified Copy in this less surreal, less distanced study of knowing and not knowing. The reflections and projections now bounce among a trio of characters and are fogged by delusion and deception—or simply missed communications. The opening dialogue (I’m not lying to you…) is part of a disembodied one-sided conversation establishing the alienated, fragmented atmosphere—as well as the deceit inherent to film. The voice is that of Akiko, a college student who works as a prostitute. Already subject to objectification and the fulfillment of others’ fantasies, Akiko’s identity is particularly slippery, as much to everyone around her as to herself.  Just who is she to her volatile fiancé, who knows nothing of her night life? Or her beloved grandmother she can’t bear to see? Or to the old, retired professor and translator who hires her one evening? “[Q]uestion marks are the punctuation of life,” states the director. “When it comes to showing human beings, complexity and concealment are a crucial part of the character.” As the projected identities collide with reality, rupture is inevitable

Part of film series

Read more

Late Kiarostami

Other film series with this film

Read more

Abbas Kiarostami, A Cinema of Participation

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Música de Câmara. The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes

Read more

From the Harvard Film Archive Collection …

Read more

Chile Año Cero / Chile Year Zero

Read more

People and their Virtue. Two Films by Wang Bing

Read more

Trenque Lauquen by Laura Citarella

Read more

I Heard It Through the Grapevine with James Baldwin

Read more

Filmmaker, Guest Worker: Zelimir Zilnik’s Expatriates

Read more

Adachi Masao’s Revolution+1

Read more

Out of the Ashes – The US-ROK Security Alliance & the Emergence of South Korean Cinema