Film Review: Kiarostami Continues to Mesmerize with ‘Like Someone in Love’

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Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Minor Abbas Kiarostami is still a reason for celebration. While the internationally acclaimed auteur’s latest work, “Like Someone in Love,” opening tomorrow at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, is a bit more frustrating than his best films (“Certified Copy,” “The Wind Will Carry Us”), it still contains such confident, intriguing filmmaking that it merits consideration for your movie dollar this weekend.

An Asian cousin to the European “Certified Copy,” “Like Someone in Love” often begs for similar degrees of interpretation and, once again, it feels like Kiarostami is purposefully trying to make a specific reading of the film impossible, asking viewers to become engrossed in theme more than plot. His reliance on long takes, natural lighting, crowd noise, and other trademarks of his style lend an air of importance to everything, as if we should be asking ourselves “what this means,” when the answer may mean that it should be read much more literally than a specific interpretation requires. That’s how I feel about “Certified Copy,” one of my favorite films of the ’10s and a work that I think only gets better when you stop trying to figure it out.

Read Brian Tallerico’s full review of “Like Someone in Love” in our reviews section.

To be fair, while it definitely has some intentionally obtuse storytelling elements, “Like Somone in Love” also feels like a straightforward piece of work than “Copy.” However, it instantly feels cut from the same cloth. The first scene, a 14-minute one in a restaurant, consists of two angles, one pointing at our heroine and one, sort of from her viewpoint but also sort of not, looking at the crowd in the establishment. One is instantly reminded of the restaurant scenes in “Copy.” Similarly, Kiarostami loves travel, exemplified by long takes in cars or walking. When a character is told that a trip will be an hour car ride, I half-expected the entire hour to be in the film.

Said car ride carries Akiko (Rin Takanashi) to her latest job, one she fights doing in that opening scene. While the majority of that scene centers on her lying to her boyfriend over the phone as to where she is, her real secret is not just that she’s not with him but that she’s a high-priced escort. As she rides in the cab to her assignment, she listens to the voice mails left her by her grandmother, a woman who has come to visit her in Tokyo but who Aki can’t bring herself to even pick up at the train station because of the shame regarding her profession.

Continue reading for Brian Tallerico’s full “Like Someone in Love” review.

Like Someone in Love
Photo credit: Sundance Selects