Rin Takanashi (Eurospace/Sundance Selects)

Director Abbas Kiarostami likes to shoot his characters in cars. This theater on wheels comes off like chamber pieces played out in front of steering columns, actors driving aimlessly through landscapes bleak and beautiful. In his latest film, Like Someone in Love, an elderly professor becomes a kind of dashboard confessor to a pair of young lovers. But the besotted tone of the film’s title song, performed by Ella Fitzgerald, is not the film’s tone at all. The film’s characters seem always to just lose sight of that elusive emotion, from family and lovers alike.

The movie opens in a posh Tokyo cafe restaurant where we hear Akiko, off-screen, talking into her cell phone. Many of the film’s conversations are heard at a distance, in voice mails, through windows, behind glass walls. Akiko seems to be in a business meeting, but although her boss looks like he could have walked out of an Ozu movie, he’s her pimp, and she’s a high class hooker whose calling cards are scattered in Tokyo phone booths. Her boss has a particular job for her, and on her way to her assignation, this film with a title that evokes romantic love plays tones of love’s loss. As Akiko rides in a cab with the bright lights of a Tokyo evening washing over her, she listens to a series of voice mails from her grandmother, who had arrived in Tokyo that morning hoping to meet for lunch. The light in the cab is dark, and we see Akiko through reflections, which makes her restrained reaction all the more heartbreaking.

Tadashi Okuno (Eurospace/Sundance Selects)

Her final destination is the home office of august scholar Takashi (Tadashi Okuno, a veteran stage actor in his first film role), who doesn’t seem to understand the purpose of Akiko’s visit. When Akiko undresses and gets under the covers, Takashi offers to make her soup. The escort is somebody’s granddaughter, and Takashi isn’t the only one in the movie who sees their relationship in this light. Akiko, emotionally charged by the missed connection with her grandmother, seems to be looking for elder guidance; Takashi, playing Ella Fitzgerald records about the emotional and physical imbalance that love causes, needs to take care of somebody.

This is only my interpretation. The film’s characters make varying interpretations and assumptions about each other, which are often wrong, but in their way, none of them is wrong. Kiarostami has said that he makes one film while audiences see a hundred different films in their head. Unlike most filmmakers, Kiarostami doesn’t force his perspective. What’s intriguing and maddening about his films is the ambiguity – the uncertain motivation of the driver in Taste of Cherry, the perceptual shift in Certified Copy. Kiarostami documents this ambiguity in silences as well as screams as his characters work out the meaning of existence and, in his last few films, relationships. Kiarostami’s latest takes him far from his native landscape to a Tokyo that is as beautiful as it is alienating. Like Someone in Love is a quietly mournful drama, its potentially sordid pieces making a bittersweet puzzle.

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Like Someone in Love
Written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami
With Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Ryo Kase.
Not rated: Contains violence and mild sexual situations
Running time 109 minutes