Like Someone In Love

Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone In Love (Japan, 2012) - It must have bugged Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami that, with Certified Copy, he had strayed perilously close to making a commercial film. If so, he’s set the record straight and saved his reputation as an abstruse, impenetrable arthouse director with this Japanese-set follow-up, which was greeted with a mix of bafflement and boos at its Cannes competition press screening. / The very title of Abbas Kiarostami's Tokyo-set character waltz "Like Someone in Love" -- named for the jazz standard Ella Fitzgerald croons on the soundtrack -- promises something as woozily romantic as "Certified Copy," his 2010 cat's cradle of lovers' memories. As it turns out, it's the first, not the last, word of the title that's key to this droll, elegant but faintly trying study in emotional artifice. An unofficial twin to "Copy," sharing its playful preoccupation with identities mistaken and assumed, it's a more austere and less intellectual work, certainly less attractive to distribs, though auteur cachet should see it through. 2012CANic, 2012NYFF, 2012TOR. RATING: 7