"Lonely as this finger": Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love

(Note: My essay on Kiarostami's earlier, companion film, Certified Copy, may be found here: http://ajournaloffilm.blogspot.com/2012/02/place-spacious-and-strange-abbas.html )

**SPOILERS**

I recently dipped back into Russian literature - after too a long hiatus - with Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, a gripping read that caught at my heart as much as it stimulated my mind, in the way that only the emotionally vehement and intellectually rigorous Russian writers seem to be able to do. The novel has clear philosophical and political themes, but the book centers on human relationships - between parents and children, between friends, between lovers, between gentry and peasantry - and on the way those relationships constantly shift and communication fails, especially under the strain of a generation gap, a gender gap, a class gap. In one scene, a husband and wife comfort one another in the sudden, careless departure of their son, a son whom they love so dearly but do not really understand and do not really commune with on any level:

 "'He has gone, left us!' [the father] faltered. 'Gone, because he found it dull here with us. I'm a lonely man now, lonely as this finger,' he repeated again and again, and each time he thrust out his hand with his forefinger pointing away from the rest. Then [his wife] came to his side and pressing her grey head to his grey head, she said: 'It can't be helped, Vasya. A son is an independent person. He's like a falcon that comes when he will and flies off when he lists; but you and I are like the funguses growing in hollow tree: here we sit side by side, not budging an inch.'"

"Lonely as this finger," connected but always separate from the hand. And even on a deathbed later on, parents and son are separate; they do not understand one another no matter how much blood joins them, no matter how much one may yearn for the other.

The relationships in this masterful book, speak so truly and poignantly about the human problem of communication: we long for a connection, we long to understand and be understood, we long for something real with one another - but we are always aware of something we are missing, a connection not quite made, a communication not quite fully received, even in the healthiest of relationships.

And even at the meta-level in my reading experience with this book, this moving story, I was aware, as I always am with Russian literature, that it is a translation. In an odd word choice that puzzles me, in a strange interchange between characters where I don't understand a motivation, I am aware, however much I become invested in the lives and characters of the novel, that I am missing something. With my inevitable limitations as an English speaker, as an American - as someone who does not know Russian, who is not Russian - I miss something. Always. In reading a translated book, I am ever aware of this - and I mourn what I cannot have - but my interaction with a translated book only brings to the fore something that is always true, in every communication I send, in every communication I receive: that we are working with signs and symbols, and we do not always fully understand what the sign signifies and what the symbol represents - and that, at an even more basic level, the sign will never be the thing it signifies. If I have only the sign, I do not have the signified. Literary critics, the deconstructionists in particular perhaps, have articulated this problem – the best they can, that is, with the limitations of words. Communication will always break down, will always be imperfect.  And yet, at a practical level, we cannot remain in a state in which we point out the limitations of every sign and symbol; however limited, we strive to communicate with one another, to understand one another, and we hope to make contact; we hope for communion, for intimacy, and for love.

Abbas Kiraostami's most recent film, Like Someone in Love, a companion piece to his 2010 film, Certified Copy, understands our problem and understands our desire: it understands our strivings for connection in the midst of a world where we always strain to see, to hear, to understand.

Running as a stream over, under, and through the film, noises that are a mere background to the main story constantly distract us and deflect our attention – they burden our strain to listen and to understand: music, conversations, traffic sounds. Even inside what should be the quiet of a car or inside the walls of an apartment, the exterior noises intrude in every moment. And our vision, too, as much our aural sense, is constantly obstructed and distracted: we see our characters through a curtain or from a distance and behind objects; we see them as a likeness in a photo, in a hazy reflection, or through a window that is reflecting something or someone else.  Layers of other sights and sounds come between us and our object, and we are aware of the constant decisions we must make in each moment - what do I listen to? what do I look at? what is most important? how do I interpret this thing I see and hear only so imperfectly?

The opening scene of the film beautifully encapsulates the struggle throughout the film to discern, perceive, and understand. The scene is a humming restaurant, or a bar, rather - a pleasant place, where the conversation seems friendly and lively, where the music falls pleasantly on the ear, where groups of people sit or stand in animated groups - talking, laughing, leaning in and out, making gestures. And through it all, the sound of one woman's voice rises, slightly louder than the rest and arrests - or barely arrests - our attention, gradually drawing our curiosity. The camera stays still for a long time, letting us take in the whole scene - a wide frame - without giving us hints of whom we should look at or listen to. Whose voice is it? Is it someone with those standing in that group in the background on the right? What about in that group of three in the middle, sitting at the table? Or perhaps the red-headed woman in the foreground to the right? We strain to match the sound of the voice to one person's lips. We think, for a moment, we've succeeded, and then, stop and doubt the match. 

But the camera eventually shifts and gives us some direction, and we see the speaker is a woman on a phone who has been out of sight, just behind the camera's gaze. And so we do begin to focus on her, to try to listen, but her words are out-of-context; we hear the words - or read them, rather, since the film is in Japanese, translated for us, we hope with some accuracy, into English words that appear on the screen - and we understand the words individually and in groups, but the clues as to who she is and whom she's speaking to build only gradually - and we doubt our guesses about this overheard slice of a conversation. 

The scene continues in this vein, and we finally understand whom we are to focus on, but she is often out of sight still, and the camera focuses on the person she is speaking to or on another group who isn't even aware of her: it focuses on the group of three at the table; or on the red-headed woman, who seems to be a friend, maybe a colleague; or on an older man, who seems to know her well.  And still the bar sounds and activity constantly intrude - we follow people going in and out, listen to and see the door open and close, sense the constant conversations - and with all of these distractions, we continue to try to understand who the woman is, who the red-headed woman is, who the man is and what they all are to each other. The man, we guess, is a boss - and owner of the bar? - but he seems to treat her in an almost familial fashion - a father? But, then, that doesn't quite fit; they don't act like father and daughter - the relationship isn't somehow familiar enough. The red-headed woman seems to be a friend, clearly listening in on the phone conversation, even speaking into the phone herself to the caller, but the two women are not together at the same table; the red-headed woman seems to be with someone else, someone who is mostly just out of our range of vision. There's something familial about the relationship between the women, too, but something there doesn't quite fit that label either.

Who the women are and who the boss man is becomes clear as the film goes on - we learn the main woman's name, Akiko -  but the guesses we make about what their words mean in full, about who they are, and what they are, and how they are related to each other represent the bigger thread of guesses and imperfect assumptions and interpretations running throughout the film. We make guesses about the characters of the film; they make guesses about one another. By the end, who the characters actually are is clear, but what they mean to each other and how we might define, once and for all, their relationships eludes both them and us.

But the desire for a meaningful relationship, for intimacy - for a true connection and defined roles - is no less urgent, perhaps all the more urgent, as interpretations go awry and as modes of communication fail: as phone messages go unanswered or a phone is left to ring, or a phone is disconnected; as a pounding on a door is ignored; as a specific car horn is subsumed among the other traffic noises; as a line of print is inadvertently left out of a book; as a request to move a car is ignored; as a whisper is too quiet, a gesture too obscure.  Throughout the failures in communication and interpretation, we see the urgent desire for relationship and for closeness in key moments and through key characters - through Akiko’s boyfriend's tracking of her, and through his decision to marry her so that, as he says, she will be forced to be with him, so that she will have to answer his questions, so that she will not lie to him anymore; we see it through an old widowed professor's invitation to a call-girl - our Akiko, as it turns out - where we soon realize he does not want the false intimacy of purchased sex but something nearer to companionship, a shared meal, a conversation over a glass of wine, something like the intimacy he shared with his deceased wife perhaps.

And while those moments and characters are certainly most central to the film, they are highlighted most beautifully, for me, through another scene representing the longing for relationship and the simultaneous failure of communication - through some smaller moments relative to our main character, Akiko, and to her grandmother. As Akiko rides, via taxi, through the city at night for her meeting with the professor, she listens to her phone messages, ear buds dangling from her ears; the camera remains on her face - luminous and beautiful but impassive.

There are seven messages, most from her grandmother, who has arrived in Tokyo and who wants to meet with Akiko. The series of messages take us through the grandmother's day: in the first message, she is riding on the train, nearing Tokyo, looking forward to seeing Akiko; in the next message, she has arrived, and she tells Akiko where she is and that she will wait for her - she hopes for  a lunch with her granddaughter; in the next, it is lunch time, and she has resigned herself to lunch without Akiko; in the next, she describes finding a picture of a woman that looked like Akiko in the phone booth - she says she knows it couldn't be Akiko, but she calls anyway - perhaps, somehow, she will make contact this way - but only an ill-pleased man answers; in the final message, she has returned to the train station - it is nearing the train's departure time, and she will wait for Akiko under a statue at the station. The longing for her granddaughter runs throughout each message - though we understand the grandmother has long lost touch with the real Akiko - we become more gripped with each message, waiting with each to hear where the grandmother is, if she's given up, and wondering if there is still time for Akiko to get to the station.

Akiko's impassivity - a constant throughout the messages - breaks as she listens to her grandmother's final words, and she asks the driver if the train station is nearby. What will she do? We so long for her to run to her patiently waiting grandmother and to embrace her.

As the taxi moves past the station, we rejoice at a first glimpse of the statue and then, straining, we finally spot an aged figure standing underneath it. But as we move past, other cars obstruct our vision, people walk in front of us, and the car carrying Akiko doesn't stop; the woman we believe to be Grandmother is out of sight. Once more around, Akiko asks, and we strain, again, with Akiko, to see that small, waiting figure, craning our necks, almost, to see around the obstructions. We see her, but she is soon lost to sight once again, and the car, carrying Akiko and the chance for a connection, moves on. The gentle tension and longing of the scene paired as it is with those things blocking the connection is so beautifully realized, suffused with tenderness, but it also relentlessly backs away from a fulfillment for that tenderness, backs away from a possible connection.

What would have happened if Akiko and her grandmother had met? Was that woman beneath the statue really Akiko's grandmother? Akiko clearly believed her to be, and perhaps that emotional reality is what mattered most as the taxi passed the station. For Akiko, the woman was her grandmother, not just like her, and she decided to reject the connection with her.

Likenesses and surrogates run through the film - Akiko is mistaken for a granddaughter, the professor is mistaken for Akiko's grandfather, and these mistakes are not corrected.  And Akiko tells a story about when she believed, as a young girl, that a famous painting was a portrait of herself - and she still half believes it is though she knows it isn't she. She lifts her hair into a bun, imitating the woman of the portrait and showing just how similar she is to the painted woman.

Likenesses, surrogates, translations - they are not the originals, but perhaps the translation is all we have.  Even the most astute translator of words and of people - the professor, who is both a translator and sociologist, with his house full of well-thumbed books and a mind full of research - cannot find a way to communicate with perfect precision with those around him. His ability to perceive, like anyone's, is flawed and his ability to communicate is flawed. His manuscript suffers an imperfect printing; he cannot express what he really wants from Akiko; he falls asleep when he should be paying attention; he repeats only a portion of a conversation when he is asked for the whole; he backs out of his driveway, blind, nearly hitting a woman and her children; he wants to protect Akiko but wanders from window to window when she is threatened, unable to get a clear view and unsure of how to act.

But for all his flawed communications and failed connections and even with Akiko's own failed connection with her grandmother, the professor and Akiko find in one another, something like a familial relationship that feels true. He says, at one point, almost playfully but also seriously, he will act as grandfather to her, and later, when she needs a grandfather, she calls him. We are aware of a kind of emotional reality between them, however tenuous and shifting the relationship.

And the film's final scene offers another kind of emotional reality as it brings about a sort of violent end to the film’s train of constantly obstructed communications – obstructed communications between film and viewer, between film character and film character. A stone is thrown - it's sudden, elemental, violent; it is a barbaric communication, but it forms, for us, almost a relief: a concrete something that transmits one, clear, specific thing, emotional frustration and anger; there is no questioning its message.  The stone shatters a glass window – glass like the glassy surfaces we see throughout the film - glass that hides something by a reflective surface and simultaneously allows a view to something; glass that has kept out noise and let noise seep in; glass that has reflected people and distorted people.

The glass that has half blocked and half allowed sounds and sights shatters almost joyously, if terrifyingly, removing, if only for a moment, the questions about what a symbol means and the questions about what one person is to another.  “Talk to me,” this moment screams; "I need to know you hear me, not through a phone, not through an intercom, not through a car window, not through a glass darkly, but directly." 

Because the moment is so sudden and violent, we understand it cannot maintain itself and it will not bring about trusting intimacy. But we do understand it in itself ; we understand the rage and the desire that brought it about. And it does feel like a relief, as thwarted as we have been throughout the film, so distracted by other things, voices, sounds, sights, that we have yearned for focus and one specific moment of clarity, for a specific moment of truthful contact.

And with that we leave the film’s world. And whether we leave hopeful or in despair will perhaps depend on our own hope for true contact in a world of signs and symbols, likenesses and translations.

For my part, I am hopeful. My reading of Turgenev will always only be an imperfect one; my reading of anything and anyone will always only be imperfect. But even with a translation, I find those moments of emotional contact. My heart weeps with Turgenev’s parents, bereft and separated for their son – and my emotion is real, however, flawed is my perception of the relationship and of the language. And my heart rejoices in the moments of something like familial connection between the professor and Akiko – they are like a granddaughter and grandfather – and for me, it is enough.

A Place "spacious and strange": Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy

(Note: My essay on Kiarostami's follow-up companion film, Like Someone in Love, may be found here: http://ajournaloffilm.blogspot.com/2013/03/lonely-as-this-finger-abbas-kiarostamis.html )

In the puzzlement and bewilderment of mind in which I found myself after watching Abbas Kiarostami's 2010 film, Certified Copy, I began thinking of essayist and novelist Pico Iyer’s recent piece in the LA Times, “The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence.”  In it, Iyer considers our position “in the privileged world” where we “have access to more information than we know what to do with” and where we manage that information by reducing it to “a sound bite or a bumper sticker,” bits and pieces that are easily categorized, easily managed.  As much as Iyer admires the short pithiness of Hemingway sentence, he offers for our consideration the complexity of a long sentence, that complexity as a protest and counter to our reductionist tendencies.  The long sentence, that --

“collection of clauses that is so many chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory and imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or.  With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions . . . and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying 'Open wider' so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).”

As Iyer imagines this “long and winding sentence” as a sort of antidote for these times when “we’ve got speed and shortness up the wazoo” and where we manage information rather than reflect on the nuanced significances of it, I think Kiarostami’s worlds –as I’ve experienced them so far in Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, and now, Certified Copy—worlds created on the screen rather than on the page, offer a similar antidote.  All of these films resist “trite conclusions,” easy “reductionism,” and “either/or” ideas. None of these films offer a traditional plot; they feel long, wending their ways as meandering streams with no decisive signs to tell us whether we are wending—as we go with them—north, south, east, or west.  We are left to ourselves in a way to fill in the gaps as we can or as we will, to look for small signs or subtle patterns, to puzzle over contradictions or ambiguity. 

Certified Copy is not without signs and patterns, and we are invited, even, to see in the contradictions a particular sign and a particular pattern though I think, in the end, I cannot say for sure if I’ve delineated the pattern, correctly read the sign.  The title—the most obvious sign in the text—first tempts us to say, “this is what the film is about.”  But what does it mean and to what does it refer?  Within that title is contradiction, a contradiction the film explores, overturns, and further complicates on its winding way.  A “certified copy” is a reproduction, duplicate, or imitation of an original thing – perhaps a document, perhaps a piece of art, perhaps something else—a reproduction that has been declared authentic and complete, saying, “this thing is exactly like the original.”   The question is, how can a copy of anything be certified?  How can it be authentic and complete if it isn’t the thing itself?  But we might also ask, if a copy looks exactly like its original, why do we need the original?  What value does the original hold?  What value does the copy hold? How can we tell? Who decides?

While these questions might seem to be best suited for a philosophical and ontological or art-related treatise or lecture, Kiarostami playfully explores in his film these questions by way of duplicated and duplicating images and characters, unresolved conversations, and a key relationship, a relationship that within itself is a mystery, a contradiction, something that parallels the central contradiction of the film.  

The films opens with what perhaps may seem to be the very lecture suited to the subject: a British writer, James Miller (William Shimell), who has just published a book entitled Certified Copy, has come to Italy to promote its Italian translation, and he speaks to a gathered group about his book’s subject, a subject centering on the claim that a copy of a work of art has the value of its original.  

Several things distract us from attending to his lecture, however, and the distractions, the invasions, invite us into the subject by way of other, less direct, avenues:  during the lecture a woman—whom we come to know as Elle, a Frenchwoman (Juliet Binoche) —and her sullen pre-teen son come late to the lecture, disrupting our concentration.  While at first, we feel annoyed, trying to listen to the lecture but being drawn into watching the woman, we must stop to consider that Kiarostami wants that concentration to be disrupted; the camera focuses not on Miller, but on the woman and her son, the woman whispering to her son and trying to appease his clear distaste for being there and the woman whispering for unknown reasons to the man next to her and to the woman behind her.  She and her son leave before the lecture is finished, and, in a further distraction, Miller’s own phone rings; he briefly apologizes but makes no hesitation to answer the call and talk for a moment –he himself has interrupted his lecture. 

What we are to make of the distractions exactly, I can’t say, but we are clearly led away from the lecture – the straightforward point by point presentation – and forced to look in another direction, and not just one other direction, but many other directions, as if to say, we cannot really get at this thing this way; we’re going to have to try to come at it elliptically, perhaps more slyly and playfully. A lecture won’t do it, not for us.  

A similar scene, centering on an explanation and a distraction from that explanation, is repeated later when Elle, who becomes companion to James for the majority of the film, takes James to see a piece of art thought to be an original for many years but discovered to be a copy.  As a copy it nonetheless resides in the art museum and when Elle and James stand before it, a tour guide comes along to explain the painting’s origins to his group.   Elle and James listen, the multi-lingual Elle translating the Italian into English for James.  But her translation is no translation for us; it merely distracts us from the content of the tour guide’s description as we watch James and Elle themselves.  And James, himself, wanders away midway through, uninterested; “I’ve seen others like it,” he says.  And so while we have had another chance here at a sort of straightforward discourse about a copy, a certified copy, if you will, Kiarostami keeps us from engaging in that explanation; we remain with James and Elle, a pair whose relationship, from its beginning stages, confuses and intrigues us and leads us, perhaps, into a more elusive and more human reflection on the meanings and contradictions present within the notion of a “certified copy.”

Throughout the film, their relationship, its exact nature, constantly elides our grasp.  As the film opens, it seems clear that Elle and James are strangers; she’s come to buy books and listen to writers. James interests her particularly, and she buys several of his books so that she may give signed copies as gifts—and her son teases her about her interest.    Elle offers to spend the day with James, and when he accepts, their initial interactions play like those of two strangers.  But later, a shift occurs, and their relationship is reinterpreted for us as something with a long and intimate history, a marriage, in fact.  Later yet, when we seem to have settled on an identify for them as a married couple, James acts as if he has no memory of certain key moments and places in their married history, moments and places anyone would remember.  Befuddlement sets in when we try to reconcile these varying versions of their relationship; are they strangers or are they husband and wife?  Is their relationship real, or is it only a play at something real?  The film teases us; we long to know which is which; we yearn to reconcile what we have seen with something coherent, something of one piece. 

But in that longing to know, our desire to discover if the relationship is authentic, we must ask, why does the answer matter?  Why must we know?  After all, this is only a film; these are actors playing parts, and Kiarostami, I believe, repeatedly draws our attention to this fact, with camera angles that give us artificial or awkward views, or at least, angles that are uncommon, not the sort we are used to.  I am reminded, for example, of several moments in which Elle, looks directly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall.  At one point, she is alone, gazing in a mirror, applying lipstick and choosing earrings; in another moment, she is speaking directly to James, but looking directly at us.  It’s uncomfortable; we are aware of the artificiality of the situation, of the fact that “we are watching a film.” 

But somehow, we still want to know.  We still want to know the mystery of James and  Elle’s relationship.  Elle herself, played so beautifully and naturally as she is by Binoche, we want to receive at face value.  How can we do anything else in the moment, for example, when James, relating a story of a woman and her son, brings Elle to tears?  Throughout his narrative, she becomes more and more rigid, her eyes speak their vulnerability, and we know that she is moved by some deep and painful emotion.  But even as we are moved by her emotion, we are checked again moments later by some subtle element that belies the reality of the situation.  James himself seems throughout to be playing at a part, rather than inhabiting a person.  His role is perhaps intentionally played as such, that is, not quite naturally, by William Shimell, but intentional or not, his character brings us again to our questions about authenticity, to our discomfort with a suspected artificiality, to our desire to know what is real and what isn’t. 

The film repeatedly and throughout plays with our sense of the real and the artificial, the genuine and the copy.  We see our characters time and again in mirrors or in and through reflections.  

Even the very multiplicity of languages in the film – English, French, Italian – switching from one to another, often mid-conversation –reminds us that a translation of a thing is only an estimate of the original thing.  Language gets at something but does not equal the thing itself.  In one scene, Elle engages in conversation with a French couple visiting Italy, asking them to describe their feelings about a fountain’s statue in the village center; she leads them to James and asks the woman to repeat what she’d said.  The woman offers an answer, but Elle is dissatisfied, reminding her, “no, that isn’t what you said before.”  In the end, we are not sure what the woman said; Elle heard her say one thing, the woman says she misheard her – and we never discover the original thought, for Elle and the woman wander off, talking out of our ear shot.  Again, we long to know—though this stranger’s thought can’t really matter to our story—what is authentic: what was it she said at first? 

Early on in the film, as James and Elle drive to their day’s destination, Elle describes her sister Marie, to James, admiring her sister’s capacity for loving costume jewelry; to Marie, Elle says, “fake jewelry is just as good as the real thing . . . She’s a simple person . . . there’s no difference between copy and original.”  James responds, “She’s lucky; I wish I could be more like her.. . . I wrote my book partly to convince myself of my own idea. [But] she seems to believe in the idea simply and naturally.”  He cannot do what she does, he says, because “there’s nothing simple about being simple.”   If we, as viewers, were like Marie, I suppose, discovering the exact nature of James and Elle’s relationship, discovering the difference between the copy and the original throughout the film, wouldn’t matter; we could simply embrace what we see in the moment, taking it for itself, not worrying about the difference between seeming and being.  But we are revealed as more like James, discovering that being simple is not so simple.  We want to know because we want to know how to assign value; we want to know how to feel about one thing over another.

Can anyone, really, be as simple as Marie?  Is Marie, even, as simple as Elle describes her?  Throughout the film, our perceptions of a thing or a person or a sentence are constantly overturned or turned inside out until we are left with irreconcilable complexity.  And the film invites us to respond, to ask, How do I respond to a complexity like this, to this sort of conundrum?

Iyer says, that the long and winding sentence can give us “depth, the nuances – ‘the gaps.’” He writes that a sentence that resists our either/or tendencies and that “has room for certainty and doubt at once” both remedies the soundbites of our age and gives us something we long for, perhaps without knowing it: mystery and a place that feels as “spacious and strange as life itself.”  

I encourage my English 101 students, when they approach dense texts and when they need to say something in response to those dense text, to embrace what John Keats described as “negative capability,” that is, the capacity or ability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”  Keats, of course, wasn’t promoting throwing aside facts or reason, and I certainly do not wish my students to do so, but he was implying that when we have the ability to resist panic in the face of uncertainty, to remain calm when confronted by mystery, we then have the ability to dive into the complexity, to see a thing from delightfully multiple angles.  When we can embrace complexity without panic, I think it is then that we can relish the “gaps” and the “nuance” that Iyer describes. 

Kiarostami’s film, which draws me into a place "spacious and strange" and which challenges me to the same negative capability I urge my students to practice, still evades me.  I cannot here comprehend its spiraling multiplicities.  I cannot reduce it to a simple thing.  But in the end, I want to embrace its thorniness, its resistance to neat categories, and to let it offer unexpected resonances, as it continues to sit in my mind.