In Which We Close Our Legs Permanently

Caterpillars

by LINDA EDDINGS

Like Someone In Love
dir. Abbas Kiarostami
109 minutes

Watanabe is an old widower who hires a prostitute, Akiko (Rin Takanashi). When she arrives, he explains that he has prepared a sort of shrimp stew. She is aghast and takes refuge in his bed. He explains that the soup is from her home region. She tells him how much she hated it as a child. Like Someone in Love is Abbas Kiarostami's feature length tribute to the famous Japanese director and screenwriter Yasujiro Ozu, and it is always surprising, perhaps even more so for those outside of Japan than its citizens.

Akiko's cross to bear is her jealous boyfriend Noriaki. Everyone wants Akiko to break up with Noriaki: her pimp, her john, her colleagues. He makes her go in the bathroom and count the floor tiles, so that when he comes later, he can make sure she was there. The thing he hates most is her lying, and she lies often.

This is the kind of inching drama that was invented by a master. In Like Someone in Love, it's clear how much the Iranian-born Kiarostami sees in the legendary Ozu. It has always been obvious that the chatty, rhythm and cadence conversations that make Ozu's dramas so unmistakable inspired Kiarostami to always have something to say. Like Someone in Love's long scenes use Ozu's method of creating tension through the elongation of events into unexpected places and scenarios.

It is exhilarating to see Kiarostami freed of his native land in Like Someone in Love, and he has a great deal to see about the Japanese —who could understand a cloistered, faddish people better than an Iranian? The environments of his native Iran, much of them at least, are bleak indeed. It is his direct confrontation of these things that has helped Kiarostami acquire an unrivaled reputation in his medium.

Ozu's message about his own society was the skewering of Japan's social mores, and Kiarostami takes that up with wonder and curioisity. Like Someone in Love is the anti-Lost in Translation because any understanding the Iranian director brings to bear, even on a surface level, is devastating.

Watanabe's apartment is a sealed den, a very private place when he goes to turn away from the world and into himself. Akiko moves among his things, comparing herself to a painting that hangs on his wall. Watanabe explains that it marks the separation of Japanese art from the west in 1900. The widower has also removed himself from the urban world that occupied his life for decades, and absconded to the country.

Before a coitus that never comes (Watanabe is too shy, really), the two are practically humming at each other, exposing the innards of their respective situations without real articulation. There is no small talk in Kiarostami. The reason for this is simple — in a watched society, any exchange can occur quickly and in code, heightening the tension in any conversation.

One of Kiarostami's major talents has always been his casting. This is so much so that Through the Olive Trees begins with a director, meant to represent Kiarostami himself, casting for his new film at a girls'  school so that we can watch him do what he does best.

Here Kiarostami is obviously proud of what he can get out of actors in a different language. Takanashi's Akiko is absolutely radiant to the point where the camera often has to turn away from her beauty, and we sense that is what everyone finds so overwhelming about her.

The Japanese used fax machines long after the rest of the world forgot about them, and there are tons of little relics like that to find in Kiarostami's Japan. In Ozu's vision of the country, there were relics from even farther back, prized both because of their rarity in an obliterated place, and because they represented a more powerful Japan. Some of the people Ozu liked the most and least could be considered agents of this type.

There is something perpetually out of date about Like Someone in Love — even though its most disturbing sequence consists of playing the most poignant voicemails ever recorded. It is not that the film lacks the basic trappings of modernity. What makes Like Someone in Love a relic is that Kiarostami uses those trappings purely as a mechanism to hear how carelessly we speak to one another. 

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Summer Painter" - Bill Callahan (mp3)

The new album from Bill Callahan, entitled Dream River, was released on September 17th.