Master of Illusions Faces His Own Mirage

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/movies/abbas-kiarostamis-challenges-with-like-someone-in-love.html

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The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami is no stranger to the possibility of misunderstanding. You might even say that he courts the creative potential of not knowing all the facts.

His elliptical films have often left viewers tantalizingly uncertain about where things are headed, or even what exactly they are watching. In his feature “Certified Copy” (2011) Juliette Binoche played a woman whose relationship with a visiting academic seemed to change before our eyes, leading audiences into a pleasurable puzzlement, even a sense of wonder, and ultimately resulting in a more vivid fiction. His experiments in this vein, dating at least to 1990 with “Close-Up,” have helped pioneer the fashionable hybridization of fiction and documentary while also tapping older Iranian traditions of storytelling and illusion.

With his latest two films Mr. Kiarostami has found another way of challenging himself. He shot his fiction features abroad for the first time, “Certified Copy” in Tuscany and “Like Someone in Love,” which opens on Friday, in Tokyo. Avoiding the political freeze of Iran, where his colleague Jafar Panahi remains forbidden to go abroad, Mr. Kiarostami is able to spur his imagination.

“Like Someone in Love” follows a university student (Rin Takanashi) moonlighting as a call girl, as she deals with a gentle elderly man (Tadashi Okuno) to whom she has been sent and her possessive boyfriend (Ryo Kase). The opening scene, in a cafe, sets the tone for the human mystery to follow. It is shot in an off-center way that makes it hard to identify who is talking and who should be our focus.

During filming the language barrier carried with it a certain mystery for Mr. Kiarostami too. A native Persian speaker, he does not know Japanese, though he has been in Japan many times for the releases of his films.

For starters there was the practical necessity of having an interpreter on set to speak with crew and actors. But in Mr. Kiarostami’s creative process the foreignness of the situation preceded even the shoot.

“Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I’m writing about, who don’t always act in the film afterward,” Mr. Kiarostami said, speaking through his regular interpreter, Massoumeh Lahidji, in October during the New York Film Festival, where “Like Someone in Love” had its United States premiere. “This time, for the first time, as it was in a new society with new people for me, I didn’t have them.”

In other ways filming in a foreign country dovetailed with Mr. Kiarostami’s methods. By creative temperament he tends toward a hands-off approach with performers, who in the past have frequently been nonprofessionals. He likes to cast the actors, set the atmosphere, then let them do what they will.

“I usually do very little,” Mr. Kiarostami said. “But with the obstacle of a foreign language I did even less. And it went for the best.” A firm believer in the powers of body language and eye contact (terms he said in English) he places full confidence in his collaborators’ mutual desire to be understood.

“I had no idea what kind of character I needed to be,” Mr. Okuno, a grandfatherly actor who plays the professorial older man, said last month in a phone interview from Tokyo. “The director asked me to just be myself. It took me till halfway through the shoot before I finally started to figure it out.”

Mr. Kiarostami gave his actors the script one day at a time. That was in line with his fondness for leaving a movie open to interpretation — by cast and audience alike — without pinning down its meaning.

Shooting abroad, however, did entail a certain amount of preparation. Mr. Kiarostami held open auditions and wrote a more extensive script than usual. One of his most important collaborators was Ms. Lahidji. The Iranian-born interpreter who lives in Paris not only serves Mr. Kiarostami as a go-between with his French producer and at festivals, but also reads early versions of his scripts.

The two first worked together when Mr. Kiarostami directed the opera “Così Fan Tutte” for the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Among Ms. Lahidji’s duties, as a dramaturge, was rerecording the entire opera for him in Persian — in her own voice — so he would know what was going on.

“I guess now something has happened between the two of us which is above words,” Ms. Lahidji said. “He is not much of a talkative person. And maybe I spare him having to explain everything. I always had this role in mind, which is: In cinema, you need smugglers. I was kind of a smuggler also, or midwife, helping things to happen.”

On “Certified Copy” Ms. Lahidji is credited with “adapting” the screenplay. Her extensive involvement included advising him on what parts of the French- and English-language script would be in which language. She gave advice on how the mixed-language pair played by Ms. Binoche and William Shimell might interact: “If you are French and in love with an Englishman, if you start barking at him, you’d rather do it in French,” she said.

On “Like Someone in Love” Ms. Lahidji assisted before and after the shoot in her usual capacity. Among the challenges she recalled Mr. Kiarostami’s worry over whether the Japanese actors would say the epithets in the script.

Reached again recently during a student workshop at the University of Strasbourg, Mr. Kiarostami, despite suffering from the flu, talked with fresh passion about filming in Japan. He mused that he sometimes felt “more Japanese than Iranian.” And he recalled the unexpected sense of calm, even distance, he felt at the screening, from working outside his native Iran.

“I’ve always felt quite anxious for my Iranian films once they’re screened,” Mr. Kiarostami said. “I felt that I was responsible for whatever was going on in the screen. Whereas for my last two films, even for the official screenings at Cannes or any festival, I was dozing off.”

“I feel as if because they are in a different language,” he said, “with different people, I wasn’t responsible for them, and I was more of a viewer.”