Menu of The Day (21 April 2021): Like Someone in Love, a movie by Abbas Kiarostami

 Like Someone in Love

An Iranian director on a Japanese movie, in Japanese.
You may feel reasonably awkward about it, but you will be wrong. Read the name of the director (and screen writer): Abbas Kiarostami.

If you know the author you know his works, you know how he portrays things, his aesthetic etc, yet you could be dubious. But you won't be disappointed. Like Someone In Love (IMDB) is story of three persons, which realities overlap without bending.

The story is pretty simple. There a girl, a student which is also a hooker by the night. She has a boyfriend unaware of that. One night she is summoned by a new client. An old man that seems more interested in cooking for her than having sex, which at the end don't have. In the morning he will bring her to class, they meet her boyfriend who mistakes the old man for her grandfather. Once the two are alone, he asks him permission to marry her. The old man simply says he is not read, that he is too young. When the 3 meet again after the class they go together, she is afraid her 'double life' is revealed to her boyfriend but the old man bids farewell. Just to be summoned up by the girl who calls him. She has been beaten up and he helps her giving her a place to rest. Then the boyfriend pops out. That's all

This movie is about Japan as much as it could be about any other place. It has a lot of the Iranian and French exquisite thematics and sensibilities, but the overall environment, alien to the director, may have even played a fantastic additional rule in how he, Kiarostami, presents this portraits.

Like a great movie, it makes you feel in, and as it end it makes you wonder what happened to the protagonists. That is the magic.

It is a movie to be enjoyed, without sermons or anything. It is a painting. Enjoy it, but rest assure it is not for everybody.