The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s cinematic worlds have always revolved around constantly shifting relationships — between children, between students and teachers, between strangers, between lovers or spouses, sometimes between documentary realism and narrative fancy. This interest has become even more overt in recent years: 2010’s Certified Copy was some sort of masterpiece, in its perplexing portrait of a man and a woman whose precise relationship always seemed to be in flux. His latest, Like Someone in Love, may be more direct than the earlier film — you could outline its plot with some fair bit of confidence — but it continues to further his interest in tremulous emotional landscapes.
Set in Japan (a more apropos location for an Iranian director than you might think), Like Someone in Love gives us a young student/occasional prostitute (Rin Takanashi) who spends an evening with an older professor (Tadashi Okuno), only to have him begin to insinuate himself into her life in ways both welcome and troubling. As always, preconception matters a great deal, both in the narrative and in the way the film works on its audience: Kiarostami relishes exploding our assumptions about these characters, not to mention their assumptions about one another.
In doing so, he weaves a style around things seen and unseen, and heard and unheard. Indeed, while Kiarostami has always had an attuned grasp of technology and technique, this is probably his most sophisticated use of sound yet, both thematically and technically. The early parts of the film are suffused with phone calls, with half-heard exchanges and conversations, while later scenes make devastating use of offscreen sound. This isn’t just the director showing off, however — this is a film that winds up being all about the tension between external and internal space. Gradually, the collision of these different worlds begins to create something like suspense, leading to a literally shattering, yet deliciously incomplete finale.
