REVIEW - LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

A flimsy flutter of a film. Abbas Kiarostami presents us with enigmas coiled up within casual realism. Like Someone in Love is blithely satisfying, akin to dipping your toes in a meandering spring and listening to the world around you. It's simple, but beautiful in its simplicity, and Kiarostami's move to Japan is apt in this regard, as he induces memories of the famed cinema of Yasujiro Ozu in doing so, whilst altering his own style not a jot. This is all just a veil, though, concealing depth and darkness barely tangible if you're not aware to seek it out, and insidiously soft and silent as such. The confidence in Kiarostami's technique which one feels when watching his films is one which he too must feel, as he lays his film stark and bare, every layer on show; fragile, but not thin. In its unchanging clarity, Like Someone in Love is a generous film, in fact, despite its deviousness (itself more forthright than on first glance) - one is allowed to examine and appreciate every element of the filmmaking thus, and Kiarostami's reticence to indulge his audience with emotional bombast at expected junctures only enables this further, rather than prolonging the monotony. And, since this is surely exactly the film he intended it to be, how could I complain? Yet I do, as I feel he achieves nothing in the film's final twenty minutes, elaborating on a scenario we could have imagined, alongside many other possible scenarios. Instead, we are left with a conclusion that leaves only a select few scenarios open to us, none of them as interesting as those which we could have conceived in our own minds.