Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Like Someone in Love
2012 · Abbas Kiarostami · Like Someone in Love on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the city reflected across Akiko's face in the taxi. (camera)
Katsumi Yanagijima lets neon and passing buildings slide across the glass and settle directly onto her face, city and person overlapping in the same shot.
Payoff: You cannot tell where the reflection ends and the woman herself begins. In the reading: crystal-image (hyalosign). The reading calls this a crystal-image: the actual and its reflection fused until neither one ranks as more real.
Listen for how many relationships happen only by phone. (sound)
A grandmother reaches Akiko only through voicemail, a fiance interrogates her by call, a boss dispatches her by phone, voices arriving with no one actually present.
Payoff: Nearly every bond in the film is carried by a device that transmits a voice while withholding a person. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. The reading calls this audiovisual disjunction: voice and body pulled apart until sound stops confirming what you see.
Notice two people in a car facing forward, not each other. (staging)
Kiarostami's characters sit side by side in taxis and sedans, speaking sideways rather than face to face, the car becoming the film's basic confessional space.
Payoff: Looking straight ahead together is how these strangers get closest to honest.
Notice the framed photo of a young woman on his wall. (setting)
In Watanabe's apartment hangs a picture of a woman with a parrot that Akiko notices looks like her, an old resemblance quietly placed among his things.
Payoff: A likeness on a wall is already doing the work an actual relationship would normally have to do.
Watch how often something blocks your view of who's speaking. (camera)
Compositions keep a doorframe, a car pillar, or a reflection between you and whoever is talking, so you have to work to find the drama in the frame.
Payoff: The obstruction makes you do the looking yourself instead of handing you the scene.
Once you have seen it
Track the exact moment Watanabe is mistaken for her grandfather. (structure)
Her fiance assumes the old man driving her to an exam must be her grandfather, and Watanabe, without quite deciding to, simply lets the mistake stand.
Payoff: He doesn't correct the lie. He starts furnishing it instead, and that's the whole film in miniature. In the reading: the forger (le faussaire). The reading calls this the forger: someone who doesn't just tell a lie but manufactures a working truth from it.
Notice how the film ends on a single abrupt cut. (cutting)
The final event lands and the film simply stops there, mid-gesture, offering no aftermath, no resolution, and no explanation of what happens next.
Payoff: The film has spent two hours teaching you that consequences happen off-screen, and it keeps that promise to the end.
Watch what finally happens to all that glass and reflection. (setting)
Every relationship in the film has been mediated through windows, mirrors, and photographs, and in the last moment one piece of glass is physically broken.
Payoff: The medium that carried every connection in the film is the thing that finally gives way.
Carry this in: Watch the glass. Every relationship here passes through a window, a phone, or a photograph.