_Like Someone in Love_

[septimus_...@q.com]

[septimus_...@q.com]

I haven't followed Kiarostami's recent films.
_Like Someone in Love_ comes then as quite a
shock -- the director's patented techniques
and obsessions (long takes, especially from
inside moving cars) transposed from rural Iran
to ultra-modern Tokyo. The long conversations
in earlier films, often involving children and
touch on mundane everyday life and theology,
become focused on the fine arts of dissemination
and pimping. When the characters talk (or listen)
it is an act of, thrust-and-parry, to take charge
and to induce (seduce) the other party to do what
you want. The real emotional issues are avoided.
(The student-prostitute completely avoids her
grandmother's insistent voicemails and just cries
in the taxi as it circles round her undetected.)
It is a fascinating exercise.

For me, the film is ruined by the characterization
of the retired professor who hires the girl for
the night. Kiarostami depicts him as ineffectual
and kindly, a scholar with his head in the cloud.
(He even drives a Volvo, an apparent universal
symbol of intellectual detachment and otherworldlines.)
This hackneyed view of academics is a sadly mistaken
stereotype. Many (certainly not all) big-shot
university professors are the opposite -- they are
famous because they have type-A personality, and are
master manipulators who know how to exploit students
and researchers working for them. They have the
quality of pimps/slavemasters, not educators.
(This type don't drive Volvos.) It is hardly
surprising that a high ranking academic at the Univ.
of New Mexico was recently arrested for running a
prostitution ring!

Prostitution has often been like slavery anyway,
despite cinema's long-standing practice of glamorizing
or trivializing it. This film is not an exception,
but compoundsthe error by beautifying the elderly
john. What kind of people do you expect his students
to become? (One of his ex-student is the pimp/bar owner
who provides him with the girl young enough to be
his granddaughter). Not to be too moralistic, but here
in the U.S. we outlaw (and morally despise) slavery,
biological weapons, hopefully torture. Prostitution
should receive a similar, absolutist condemnation.