Like Someone in Love · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A taxi goes around the same traffic circle twice. In the back seat Akiko is watching a small old woman stand by a statue outside the station. That is her grandmother, up from the country for one day, who has been leaving voicemails since morning. Akiko doesn't get out. She asks the driver to loop the block again so she can look a second time without being seen. Then the car takes her across Tokyo to a client's apartment.

Nothing in that sequence is an action. She perceives, and she doesn't act, and the situation is untouched by anything she does. Deleuze built half his film theory on that gap. In what he called the movement-image — most narrative cinema, most of the time — a character sees a problem and does something that changes it, and the editing exists to carry the chain from perception to act. After the war, in Rossellini and De Sica, the chain broke. What a character sees becomes too large or too shameful to be answered by any act available to them, and the image stops being a link in a plot. It becomes something to look at. Deleuze's name for it is the opsign, the pure optical situation, and Akiko circling the station is as clean an instance as anyone has filmed since.

That vocabulary earns its keep by telling you where to put your attention. The temptation is to ask what Akiko should do. Call the grandmother back. Quit the job. Leave the fiancé. Read her stillness as a hole in the writing. Deleuze's terms say the hole is the subject. She has become a seer: someone whose whole capacity has migrated from the hands to the eyes, who registers everything and can convert none of it into movement. Watanabe is the same creature from the other end of a life. He has cooked, laid the table, put on a record, and he cannot name what he wants from the evening, so nothing he does can get it.

The film's organizing device is glass, and here a second concept practically volunteers itself. Deleuze's crystal-image is an image in which an actual thing and its virtual double stop being separable: a reflection, a memory, a double sitting in the same frame as the present and refusing to rank itself behind it. In the taxi, the neon city slides across the window and settles on Akiko's face while the voicemails pile up. That superimposition is physics, not an optical effect, and you cannot say which layer is the reflection. Her face is in the city and the city is on her face, and the grandmother's recorded voice keeps arriving from a present she is choosing not to enter.

The rest of the film runs on the same principle. A neighbour who has watched the apartment for years talks to Akiko through a window grille, surveillance conducted as neighbourliness, fitting her into a story she assembled from years of looking. On Watanabe's wall hangs a framed picture of a young woman with a parrot, which Akiko notices resembles her. Deleuze would call that painting a crystalline description: an image that composes its object so completely it can stand in for one. A resemblance doing the work of an identity.

Which is what happens to all three of them. Driving Akiko to her exam the next morning, Watanabe is taken by her fiancé Noriaki for her grandfather. He doesn't correct him. He doesn't quite decide not to, either. He lets the mistake stand and then starts furnishing it, with advice, concern, a warning about the boy's temper. Deleuze called this the power of the false, and its agent the forger. A liar keeps the truth intact by inverting it; a forger makes truth, and Watanabe's grandfatherhood becomes the most functional relationship in the film precisely because nobody is entitled to it. Kiarostami puts the rule of the game on the turntable: the 1944 standard that gives the film its title is a song about the symptoms of love being taken for love.

Listen, too, to how much of this film arrives without a body attached. The opening is a fixed shot of a bar interior in which we hear Akiko arguing on the phone before we know which of the women on screen she is, and the camera declines to look for her. Noriaki polices her by phone. The bar owner dispatches her by phone. The grandmother reaches her only as a recording. Deleuze's late work is full of films where sound and image stop confirming each other and become two separate accounts of the same situation. This is a small, domestic, wholly contemporary version of that: every device here transmits a voice while withholding a presence, which is exactly what the glass does with faces.

The framing pushes the same way. Kiarostami and Katsumi Yanagijima — Kitano's cinematographer, trained on frontal, locked-off compositions that sit still until something breaks — keep a car pillar or a doorframe or a reflection between us and whoever is speaking, so you hunt the frame for the drama. An image that has to be deciphered rather than simply followed is what Deleuze called a lectosign, a readable image. It's worth seeing what this does to Bazin, whose defence of the long take rested on the shot as a window: don't cut, don't editorialise, let the viewer choose where to look and be answerable for looking. Kiarostami is the most rigorous heir that argument ever had. He also builds a film in which every window reflects. The ethic survives. The transparency does not.

The debts are specific. Ozu's Tokyo Story supplies the low frontal domestic frame and the situation itself, an old Tokyo man attended by a young woman who isn't his blood; Kiarostami made that one explicit when he dedicated Five to Ozu in 2003. Rossellini's Voyage to Italy supplies the structure he had already reworked in Certified Copy, where a stranger's misreading reconstitutes what a couple is, negotiated in a car rather than dramatized. From Bresson's L'Argent come the untrained faces — Tadashi Okuno had spent decades as a background player and had never carried a film — and the terminal device of keeping the violence off-frame and cutting before anyone can absorb it. Mizoguchi's Street of Shame and Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs supply the economics: paid company as wage work, brokered by telephone and by a man who books the client, with the night city sliding past a car window as the standing image of what she owes. And Akerman's Jeanne Dielman gives him the score he refuses to write, the sex that registers only as schedule, and the nerve to end on a rupture nobody metabolizes.

That ending. A stone comes through the window and the film stops mid-gesture. Deleuze writes about cracked crystals, worlds sealed inside their own reflections until a fissure opens and something escapes toward a future. Kiarostami breaks his and gives you nothing on the far side. The glass that mediated every relationship in the picture goes, and the picture goes with it. Critics split at the time over whether this is rigour or evasion and the argument has never settled. My view: the film has spent two hours teaching you that consequence happens off-screen. The night with Watanabe is skipped. The beating is skipped. The last cut is the consistent one. You were never going to be shown the part that costs.

So what did it move? Kiarostami proved that a method everyone had filed under Iranian cinema was nothing of the kind. He arrived in Tokyo with no Japanese, worked through interpreters, shot with a small digital crew, and made something that belongs entirely to him and entirely to the city it was shot in. That is an argument about what authorship is, made in practice instead of in an interview, and it landed at the exact moment conditions at home had made his kind of filmmaking nearly impossible. It was the last fiction feature he finished. Watch it again for the windows. Count how often you are looking at a person and a reflection at the same time, and how seldom the film lets you settle on which one you came for.