Like Someone in Love (2012)

Tadashi Okuno (foreground) and Rin Takanashi in
Abbas Kiarostami's "Like Someone in Love."

Filmed in Japan, Abbas Kiarostami's “Like Someone in Love”—a ruminative, visually intriguing but sometimes frustratingly cryptic character study about the subtle friendship that develops between a reticent, secretive young college student and an elderly, retired professor—is the second feature by the acclaimed writer-director made outside of his native Iran. The first, “Certified Copy,” was made in Italy.

The movie begins at a small club in Tokyo, where we meet Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a beautiful sociology major whose curious side job as a call girl leads to complications in her life. She has an argument on the phone with her boyfriend, and a late night appointment with a new client causes her to miss a visit from her grandmother, a faux pas revealed in a series of heartbreaking voice messages.

Enter Tadashi Okuno, who plays the widowed Takashi. He prepares dinner and warmly greets Akiko at his cozy upstairs apartment decorated with artwork and lined with books from his research work. Friendly, fragile and far from a creeper, the lonely scholar wants company more than anything. After a brief but pleasant conversation, Akiko falls asleep by herself in the old guy’s bed.

The next day, Takashi drives Akiko to class where her boyfriend (Ryo Kase), a streetwise young mechanic who wants to marry Akiko, turns up. After mistaking Takashi for Akiko’s grandfather, the two men have an uneasy but candid talk about responsibility, love, maturity and marriage.

The conversation continues when Akiko returns and they drive to a bookstore. Lesser directors might cut back and forth and use close-ups, but Kiarostami—a master at filming scenes in cars and other small spaces—shows his visual virtuosity by keeping all three characters in frame in one extended shot. The effect invites the viewer to read facial expressions during pauses. The reserved, mysterious Akiko is the most difficult to figure out and therefore the most challenging; she seems to be carrying the weight of the world beyond those anxious, vulnerable eyes.

But the movie stumbles mightily at the finish line with a jarring shift in tone, veering wildly from contemplative and understated to irrational and crudely overt. It also suffers from one of the more abrupt, bizarre and inelegant endings in recent memory, as if Kiarostami hit a wall and just wasn’t sure where to go with the material.

Still, “Like Someone in Love” does have some fine performances from Takanashi and Okuno, who turn Akiko and Takashi into the kind of likable characters that are a joy to spend time with. It’s too bad Kiarostami didn’t make the film entirely about them. Their friendship evokes some of the great pairings of the cinema—like Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory in Louis Malle’s fascinating “My Dinner with Andre,” or Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s masterful “Lost in Translation.”