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Akiko (Rin Takanashi) is a sociology student by day and a high-end sex worker by night. The evening we meet her, she really, really doesn’t want to take this new gig her pimp has assigned her. She has her reasons. Chief among them is the increasingly possessive fiancé, Noriaki (Ryo Kase), whose jealous aggressions she has to field by phone until she’s blue in the face at the start of the movie. Her estranged grandma also is coming for an unannounced visit and will be here just today. Eventually, though, Akiko is persuaded to take the job; she listens to the stream of voicemails her grandmother, trying to hide her mounting devastation with each failed call, has left on the way to her john’s house, pensively imagining the time they might have had together. 

The client used to teach Akiko’s pimp. He’s a retired university professor in probably his 80s named Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), and he proves uninterested in Akiko for the sexual services she could provide. He prefers instead the kind of companionship entailing nice living-room conversations and dinners together. Their initial meeting is chaste and a little awkward; Akiko makes a few awkward jokes before declining the meal Takashi has made (a shrimp soup she had all the time growing up and now can’t stand) and then promptly going to bed. But by morning the pair seem to have fallen into a sort of granddaughter-grandfather dynamic. 

It gets progressively more protective as Like Someone in Love, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s second movie made outside his native country — and the last he saw released in his lifetime — wears on. Noriaki knows nothing of Akiko’s double life, to the point that when he meets Takashi he assumes he’s her grandfather and thinks it best to use this opportunity to get his marital blessing. But suspicions, most of them delusional, will only scale up, not helped by the fact that, as is, Noriaki manipulatively equates love with a complete and utter devotion that never strays. (When Noraki speaks about marriage around Takashi, it becomes clearer that, whether he realizes it or not, he looks at the convention less a celebration of a shared love than an avenue through which he can most effectively exert the kind of control he feels he hasn’t quite been able to assert as well as he’d like when on only a boyfriend-slash-fiancé basis.) 

Shooting in long takes and having the dialogue alternate between meandering and urgent, Kiarostami characteristically imbues Like Someone in Love with the kind of slowness imitative of life but unsettling on screen in a way that dependably coaxes critics to again and again use adjectives like “oblique” when describing it. Not very much objectively “happens.” There are a lot of long, almost lulling car rides, mostly. Like Someone in Love is not unlike Kiarostami’s even more elliptical road movie Taste of Cherry (1997) in that way.

But you notice how much of Like Someone in Love lingers, and seems only to grow, the more time you take away from it. Sadness deepens around how much these characters’ distorted perceptions of each other and themselves — magnified by the naturally self-preserving tendency not to tell the full truths of themselves — prevent them from getting what they need from each other. That reality proves most destructive with the bad-news Akiko-Noriaki relationship that will bring the movie to its whiplashed and potent coda of violence; Akiko, though, of course has it individually worse than anybody here with her susceptibility to misogynistic impulse. I like the idea of Kiarostami’s movies the critic Leah Churner proffers: that, like life, we see them almost more vividly in hindsight than in the moment.