Later, we learn that the professor has assumed the role of the call girl's "father" with almost desperate passion — not from histrionics or speeches but through revealing, repetitive actions. Messages on his antiquated answering machine let us infer that he's breaking a longstanding orderly routine to become this girl's protector. He ignores all business calls the instant he learns she's in trouble, and gets to his feet with as much vigor as an often desk-bound 80-year-old can muster.
All of which might sound pretty slight, but Kiarostami's eye and ear render it all in an intriguingly odd, often absurd light. So many of his long-take compositions could stand up to hours of museum scrutiny, which is not surprising for a commercial-illustrator-turned-director who has been experimenting with ways to suggest as many possibilities in a single (sometimes rock solid, sometimes constantly shifting) frame as possible since 1970.
Many critics have noted the wondrously jam-packed and disorienting opening shot inside a nightclub, but every shot in the film, really, is its own universe. Window panes and mirrors often relieve Kiarostami from cutting to and fro by including an offscreen character in a gorgeously warped, faded reflection. His joy in discovering a shimmering new canvas, the city of Tokyo, comes through in each cut to something quietly astonishing. It helps that sound designer Mohammad Reza Delpak makes such an enveloping "score" out of Tokyo's ambient urban cacophony.
Some critics who saw the film at Cannes last year had trouble with how abruptly and weirdly it ends. I'm semi-spoiling it for you now so that maybe you'll make less of it. The characters in "Like Someone in Love" are not very strong-willed or dynamic. The promise of income and social advancement in a ruthless economy lure them to adopt roles that fit them uncomfortably, which further prompts them to take on other roles that help conceal their shame and vulnerability.
Kiarostami presents indefinite people with indefinite motivations and desires. The way this film ends is perfect, I've decided (after wrestling with it for a few weeks) because it's a bracing slap to the face of not just these characters who have been slumming, pretending and withholding, but to many of us who might be going through life on some kind of autopilot. The film's craziest, most easily mocked character emerges as the one most fully alive. Old Kiarostami, master of paradoxes, is set in his ways, but his ways are never set.
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