General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Like Someone in Love (ライク・サムワン・イン・ラブ)

Like Someone in Love (ライク・サムワン・イン・ラブ) is a 2012 drama film directed and written by Abbas Kiarostami, a French-Japanese co-production set in Tokyo and filmed entirely in Japanese with a Japanese cast. It follows a university student who works as an escort, the elderly widowed professor who becomes her client, and her jealous boyfriend, over roughly twenty-four hours in which their relationships turn deceptive and dangerous.¹^•² The film premiered in competition at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and was Kiarostami's second fiction feature made outside his native Iran, after Certified Copy (2010).¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Abbas Kiarostami; his second fiction feature made outside Iran, after Certified Copy³
Production	France/Japan co-production by mk2 and Eurospace; 109 minutes; world premiere in competition at Cannes 2012¹^•²
Main cast	Rin Takanashi (Akiko), Tadashi Okuno (Takashi), Ryo Kase (Noriaki), Denden (Hiroshi)²
Title song	Named for the 1944 Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke standard; Ella Fitzgerald's 1957 recording plays in the film and over the end credits⁴
Japan release	September 15, 2012, distributed by Eurospace²
US release	Limited theatrical release February 15, 2013 through IFC Films; US gross $221.4K⁵
Critical reception	83% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 99 reviews; 61% Popcornmeter from 2,500+ ratings⁵

Spoilers

Plot and characters

Akiko (Rin Takanashi) is a university student who works through a date club, or escort service, to pay her way. One evening the bar owner who acts as her pimp sends her to the home of Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), an elderly, widowed retired professor living outside Tokyo. Takashi, who is more than eighty years old, seems motivated more by loneliness than by lust; the two spend the night talking, and he cooks a meal she cannot bring herself to eat because she is preoccupied with having left her grandmother, who traveled from the countryside to see her, waiting at a station.⁶^•⁷

The next morning Takashi drives Akiko to her university, where her possessive boyfriend Noriaki (Ryo Kase), who claims to be her fiancé, appears. Noriaki mistakes Takashi for Akiko's grandfather, and Takashi, rather than correcting him, plays along with the deception, offering the younger man grandfatherly advice while the misunderstanding grows more elaborate and more dangerous as the day goes on.⁶^•² The film ends abruptly, with a sudden act of violence that several critics found deliberately open-ended; the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw wrote that the curtain comes down "with an arbitrary crash just as the drama was becoming interesting," while Time Out's Geoff Andrew called the ending particularly surprising and more open than the mysterious close of Certified Copy.⁸^•³

Production

Kiarostami had wanted to make a film in Japan for about ten years before the project came together.⁷ Co-producer Horikoshi Kenzo reported that one starting point was a flyer on which a girl advertised her sexual services; Kiarostami asked an elderly actress to go out on the street during an audition process and find one.⁴ The role of Takashi was filled through a public audition in Tokyo: Tadashi Okuno, by widespread report a career background player in Japanese film and television who had never carried a leading role, was cast at 84 years old in his first film lead, and said in the production notes that he had been told nothing about the renowned Iranian director.⁹^•¹⁰

The crew was largely Japanese: cinematography by Katsumi Yanagijima, editing by Kiarostami's son Bahman Kiarostami, art direction by Isomi Toshihiro, and sound by Kikuchi Nobuyuki and Mohamadreza Delpak. Marin Karmitz and Horikoshi Kenzo produced for mk2 and Eurospace.⁴^•² The film was released in Japan on September 15, 2012, in France on October 10, 2012, and in the United Kingdom on June 21, 2013.²^•¹¹

Style and themes

The film opens with a long, stationary shot in a Tokyo bar in which a series of conversations involve a woman the viewer cannot see; for a while it is impossible to tell who is speaking. This disorientation, the sense of being in Akiko's presence without knowing her, sets the tone for a film in which voices are repeatedly carried by devices, telephones, answering machines, offscreen speakers, that transmit a voice while withholding a person.⁶^•³^•¹⁰

Cars carry much of the drama. An analysis of the film's shooting script records that five of its twelve shooting locations were car interiors, and that roughly 34 minutes of the 109-minute film, more than a quarter, relate to footage shot inside cars, a Kiarostami signature.¹² Music is diegetic (music existing inside the film's world, not added) and scarce; its central instance is the title song, the 1944 Van Heusen and Burke standard "Like Someone in Love," played on a record in Takashi's apartment, a song about the symptoms of love mistaken for the thing itself.¹⁰ The version over the end credits is Ella Fitzgerald's 1957 cover, not Dinah Shore's original.⁴

Critics located the film's themes in the gap between appearance and reality. A. O. Scott, reviewing for The New York Times, wrote that in contrast to Certified Copy, where the audience is unsure what the characters are to each other, here the motives and actions of the three characters are relatively clear to the viewer but ambiguous to themselves.⁶ Tony Rayns, writing in Sight & Sound, connected the story to the Japanese phenomenon of "paid dating," in which college students casually prostitute themselves for pocket money, and to Ozu's Woman of Tokyo (1933), while arguing the film is ultimately a morphed sequel to Kiarostami's own Through the Olive Trees (1994).⁴ Richard Brody in The New Yorker ranked it above Certified Copy, reading the title as Kiarostami's idea of what it is to be like someone in love: to bear up and do whatever is necessary to keep a connection.¹³

Reception and awards

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 83% Tomatometer from 99 reviews and a 61% Popcornmeter score from more than 2,500 user ratings; the site's critics consensus says that in his second film outside his native Iran, Kiarostami "maintains the mysterious, reflective mood of previous triumphs."⁵ Reviewers singled out both the slowness and the craft: Larushka Ivan-Zadeh called it "slow cinema" so slow that a protagonist nods off on screen, while David Denby in The New Yorker praised a sequence in which Akiko falls asleep in a taxi as Tokyo's lights play across the window, and noted that the film's lulling rhythm makes its abrupt ending more of a shock.⁵^•¹⁴

At Cannes 2012 the film competed for the Palme d'Or. It later received Asian Film Award nominations for Best Director (Kiarostami), Best Supporting Actor (Ryô Kase), and Best Cinematographer (Katsumi Yanagijima), a Gold Hugo nomination at the Chicago International Film Festival, and won a Japanese Professional Movie Award as one of the Best 5 Films of 2013.¹⁵ The film grossed $221.4K in the United States and was released on home video by the Criterion Collection on May 20, 2014.⁵^•¹⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026