The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made "Like Someone In Love" in Japan but it could have been set anywhere for this is a film that knows no boundaries or borders. As you would expect from Kiarostami it's brilliantly written and directed and beautifully played, particularly by Tadashi Okuno as an old professor whose loneliness draws him to a young student supplementing her income by working as an escort. He's not looking for sex, just conversation and company and when, the next day, they run into her jealous boyfriend the old man allows himself to be mistaken for her grandfather ... and then the boy finds out the truth.
It's a film of mostly small dramas and when violence finally erupts Kiarostami keeps it off screen. For the most part these people simply talk, about their problems, their relationships and life itself and Kiarostami films sequences in 'real time' and with a fixed camera just as he does in his Iranian films. I found it mesmerizing, at times funny, sometimes moving and in the end, really rather shocking. It makes for essential viewing.
