I was talking with my colleagues about filmmakers who work in the realm of symbols, and one of the first names that came to mind was the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who, paradoxically, is also one of the most important and original cinematic realists, as seen in his 2012 film “Like Someone in Love” (which I discuss in this clip). It’s normal for symbols to follow censorship: in the age of the Hays Code, Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch couldn’t give full vision to their lubricious fantasies, and they became masters of winks and hints, allusions and substitutions—although the Hays Code itself was hardly more stringent than the strictures of public life at large. Language, gesture, clothing and, well, art are themselves symbols, which is why the great cinematic symbolists are also naturally artists of reflexivity. For Kiarostami, who has worked mainly in Iran, the restrictions on expression and behavior are particularly narrow—and with “Like Someone in Love,” which he filmed in Japan, he found himself freer than usual to depict such ordinary events as a woman, her hair uncovered, in a bedroom with a man. But, facing the seemingly limitless freedom of depiction, Kiarostami ingeniously reverses the equation; starting with the title and continuing with the very first shot, he questions the difference between simulation and reality, between imitation and being. His subtly and sensually furious response to the notion of art representing reality is also a reversal of the idea that what’s created by art thereby exists. The symbol itself is a reality; the representation of ordinary people doing things is propelled, by self-awareness and discernment, to the heights of imagination.
DVD of the Week: “Like Someone in Love”
