Sans titre - 5The opening of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love sets the tone for the whole beguiling film. It opens onto a stylish Japanese restaurant/bar scene, with groups of young chatterers murmuring in the background. Then a voice begins to speak — a little nervously, but with some determination. It’s not a voice-over, but there is no figure in our vision to pin the sound to. Kiarostami keeps this position for several long minutes.

When Kiarostami finally turns the camera for us to realize who has been speaking, we see a young woman sitting where the camera would have been, anchored anxiously on one end of the table. Across from her sits an elderly man. In a bit, it’s confirmed that she’s misleading a suspicious boyfriend by claiming she’s studying for an exam, when in fact she’s preparing to be sent out as a call girl. She resists the order at first, but the man giving her instructions eventually overpowers her. At one moment she screams that she won’t go. But the camera once again ignores her, focusing instead on the murmuring crowd in front of her. Her action is ignored, both by her company and the camera. When we do see her again, she looks so surprised, it’s hard to believe she actually screamed.

This is the confusion of Kiarostami’s set-up: everything is ambiguous. For each thing he seems to be “telling” us, we question whether he actually means it, if it means anything at all. He never gives us the whole picture.

Kiarostami challenges his audience, but not with “twists.” Instead, it’s like the metaphor of the temperature rising slowly in a tank with a frog in it, the frog slowly finds himself immersed in boiling water, and the audience finds themselves surrounded by complete doubt.

Kirostami’s brilliant 2011 film, Copie Confirme (Certified Copy) uses a similar disturbance of narrative. In the movie, an antiquities expert (a gorgeous performance by Juliette Binoche) appears to meet a British academic for the first time, but as the film goes on, it becomes clear that they have been married for years. Are they spouses engaging in a ruse? Or is this a detailing of the long progression of a relationship, told through creative chronological tricks? Copie Confirme was supposedly Kirostami’s return to narrative filmmaking (after blending documentary and fiction film — most notably in 1990’s Close Up). To Kirostami, actors are not just sheep. In an interview with Iranian film critic Nima Hassani-Nasab, Kirostami said: “The actor is not only one of the creators of a film, but he is its most important author.”

Trading in ambiguity in film is tricky. A commercial film is meant to create a complete world on screen — one without gaps or loopholes. There is something appealing about the sensation of seeing a perfectly created world. But that’s not what Kiarostami is after . . . He leaves big gaps — perplexing, brow-furrowing gaps. Not heavy-handed, did the top stop spinning at the end of Inception, twists, but enveloping, movie-long ambiguity.

It would be unfair to describe more of Like Someone in Love — or even the plot really. It’s like poetry, worth sifting through by yourself. There is no right way to be sorting through this work and piecing it together. What the movie does have are beautiful moments, impeccably captured. It’s a slow movie — with only six real scenes for its 109 minutes, but each of these chapters stands alone with understated — and yet somehow provocative — solemnity.

Kiarostami was honored earlier this February with a retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Like Someone in Love is now playing in theaters and On Demand.


 
 
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