Review of Like Someone in Love (2012) by Mique W — 10 Dec 2013

Every bit as sexy, weird, haunting, enchanting, gorgeous and hypnotic as Abbas Kiarostami's last film, "Certified Copy", "Like Someone in Love" is a painting, a work of art -- you look closer and closer, you step away from it and come back, you ask questions, different perspectives and opinions. And sometimes, man, there's just nothing there. Kiarostami tries you in that. It's there in the lovely and wandering stares of beautiful college student/call girl Akiko (Rin Takanashi) and her elderly client Takashi (Tadashi Okuno).

Even more transfixing and melancholy are the dashboard shots from inside Akiko's taxi or Takashi's car as either/or travels from the Tokyo city to its suburbs, taken from the neon illumination of the city's peopled squares to the neighborly intimacy of its outskirts with a romantic longing, that certain emptiness of wanting to love something or someone so badly and missing everything that isn't in front of you. The ending is sudden, but it perfectly fits the rest of the movie's puzzle of cold, insinuated meaning. (81/100).