The late Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Falling in Love (2012) was originally titled “The End,” which would’ve underscored the final scene’s go-to-smash upending of viewers’ presumptions. The film, set in Japan, works like a gently penetrative Ozu-y character study until it’s transformed utterly by a sudden act of violence in the last second(s). That end is beyond any expectancy, though it’s not exactly confounding. The moment of violence isn’t an unmotivated malignity–the film’s flow of images and intensities make sense (in retrospect). Yet when the movie came out, its unnerving conclusion seemed less than undeniable to some viewers. A critic in The Guardian complained Kiarostami had “failed to come up with an ending:” “Abbas Kiarostami’s new film is a strange, unfinished spectacle whose ending simply looks amputated.” Maybe this reviewer simply stopped thinking too soon. World crises have since clarified the mystery of “that ‘missing reel’ effect.” Like Falling in Love’s shock ending now seems prophetic. Kiarostami’s film was a projection that managed to capture what Reaction would feel like to all us modern fantasts who’d assumed (like a 21rst Century Ike) things would continue to be more like they are now than they ever were before.
That Reaction isn’t limited to Trump’s triumph. Anti-modern strong man politics and sado-nativism have been on the march all over the world. Barack Obama framed this phenomenon—and affirmed a liberal democratic alternative (even as he protested against unequal wealth distribution that gives reactionaries traction)–in his Mandela address earlier this month. His speech—more on it anon—indicated he was one of those rare “real intellectuals” whom Greil Marcus searched out in the post-9/11 period:
Real intellectuals admit that it is in the nature of the human condition that it will inevitably, at unpredictable times, in unpredictable ways, produce events that leave every conceptual apparatus in ruins, and…real intellectuals value nothing so much as the chance, which comes only to a few, to do their work there.[1]
Kiarostami, OTOH, didn’t wait on such crack-ups; his art tended to be ahead of the curve. Years before our current era of Reaction, Like Someone in Love signaled The End of Progress. His feelers may have been up because he was from Iran—a country that’s been in thrall to Islamists’ refusal of modernity. Like Someone in Love was made in Japan since Kiarostami felt he could no longer make films in his censorious native country. But its subject and characters are not limited by any sense of place.
Like Someone in Love is about the human condition (and what it’s like when our circuits get blown). Kiarostami’s homage to Ozu’s classic Japanese films is anything but an exercise in narrow-casting. His characters are individuals on the verge of becoming everyman and everywoman: “My aim was on one side not to neglect their culture and their specificities, but at the same time not to leave any display of Japanese culture in my film. My concern was to find out whether there were any universal qualities in them.”
Kiarostami’s lens limns Tokyo’s blueberry-and-cherry night but he’s more focused on the romance of “The West.” The movie probes felt consequences of globalized ideas/emotions linked to pursuit of happiness in Eurozone and Anglosphere. Take the Ella Fitzgerald song, “Like Someone in Love,” which fills the void after violence, as credits roll, instantiating a fantasy-world that’s just been shattered. Ella first shows up to soundtrack a sequence in the date between an odd couple—sociology student Akiko (Rin Takanashi) who moonlights as a high end escort and Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), an elderly former university professor who hires her one evening. Both of these characters have been, in a sense, Westernized. At one point early in their date, they talk about a picture in Takashi’s apartment, “Girl with a Parrot,” that’s said to be the first modern Japanese painting to break with traditional modes of portraiture. The woman in this picture that went West is the image of Akiko. Later, student and ex-prof, will have occasion to discuss Darwin and Durkheim. These hints of Western influence have resonance because both Takashi and Akiko have been moved (more and less consciously, respectively) by the idea men and women—unbound by traditions—must be free to choose their way in the world. In contrast to It-Is-Written imperatives of pious fatalists, Takashi gently sings another song of the West—“Que Sera, Sera”—that captures his tolerant live and let live attitude (which isn’t necessarily at odds with his professional life).
Takashi has a mild manner though he’s an “important” man, according to his familiars. He seems unstuck on himself. After he passes on Akiko’s fast come-on, he doesn’t aim for a do-over when she fades out in his bed before they can have sex. (Their date seems to have gone unconsummated.) He also looks out for her once he finds out she’s in danger. Yet this gentleman john is no paragon. He’s ready to traduce romance by mixing sweetness with cash nexus. And though he may have bonded with Akiko quickly, he didn’t want to know what this beauty’s life as an escort entailed. The film brings home his obliviousness, thanks to a quiet but devastating scene that takes place as Akiko rides in a taxi to his apartment. On the way, she plays a half-dozen phone messages left for her by her worried grandmother who’d come to Tokyo on a one-off visit from the provinces that same day to offer love and support to her granddaughter. We know Akiko has already heard her grandmother’s gentle pleas, though she’s chosen not to respond to these offers of free love. (Thereby committing what is, perhaps, her one true sin.) Her ambivalence and longing are amped up when she has the driver circle the train station where her grandmother might still be waiting for her. Their missed connection hurts even more because we take it in along with the cabbie. His face betrays nothing yet his composed blankness seems to confirm he knows all. (His job, after all, would require him to take numberless call girls to clients.)
His expression—not unaware but impassive—has something in common with Takashi’s face of tolerance and the looks of Akiko’s boss who coaxes her in the opening scene to ditch her (deceived) boyfriend and blow off her grandmother. Kiarostami nailed him (in an interview) as a “very kind pimp”—a gloss that’s emblematic of the way this director’s softer unjudgmental side co-existed with hardcore morality.
I doubt I’m contriving commonalities in his characters. At a post-screening press conference—in reply to a questioner who’d suggested one of the film’s minor figures might be an alter ego—Kiarostami averred he saw himself in all his film’s players, from the pimp to Akiko’s jealous boyfriend, Noriaki (Ryō Kase), who becomes the vector of violence in the film’s final scenes.
Kiarostami keeps Noriaki outside the frame then. We tense up with Takashi and Akiko after she calls him in a panic. By the time Takashi meets her at university, her face has been bloodied. We’re not sure what happened (or what set Noriaki off) though it seems likely he’s found out his angel is an escort and her most recent client is the old scholar he’d assumed was her grandfather. After Takashi takes Akiko back to his apartment again, Noriaki arrives, threatening them over the intercom and banging on the door. Takashi peers out his window to see what Noriaki is up to. Something is thrown through the glass and Takashi goes down hard. What just happened?! How bad has he been hurt?! But there’s no resolution. We’re done. “Like Someone in Love” plays again over the credits…
One critic, Roger Ebert, claimed to have found the ending invigorating:
It’s a bracing slap to the face of not just these characters who have been slumming, pretending and withholding, but to many of us who might be going through life on some kind of autopilot. The film’s craziest, most easily mocked character emerges as the one most fully alive.
That’s not dead wrong. But Like Someone in Love isn’t a Sorelian (or sub-Maileresque) ode to violence. It’s a warning not a bash-note. No-one is meant to suppose Noriaki is on the right side (even if his type has been on the hinge of history lately). This self-made man (and Black Belt) is made to be jerked around. Consider his explanation for why he wants to marry Akiko even though they’re always arguing; he thinks she won’t be able to talk back once he’s got papers on her. Noriaki may dream of being a patriarch in full but he seems born to be played.
His descent into reactionary madness isn’t a Japanese thing. (He’s not meshugga like Mishima.) His raging instincts are best seen, per Kiarostami, as “universal qualities.” (Qualities our own wannabe domestic despot intuits from within.)
I’m reminded just now Noriaki had a cousin in world cinema—the character Scott, played by Eddie Marsan, who boils over in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (2008). Leigh famously made films in the 80s that were documents of felt life during Thatcherism. I took Happy-Go-Lucky as a tribute to the larger sense of historical possibility in the Obama era. (Didn’t have the director’s blessing, but when I asked at a public screening of Happy-Go-Lucky if he’d object to an Obama-centric view of his movie, he stayed neutral. And he’s known for dissing responses to his films he regards as deeply stupid so…) Happy-Go Lucky’s teacherly heroine Poppy (Sally Hawkins) surely embodied a spirit of spunky liberalism and multi-culti optimism.
Yet Leigh—like his fellow humanist Kiarostami—grasped things weren’t looking up for everybody. Happy-Go-Lucky got real about that through a series of encounters between Poppy and Scott, her driving instructor. (You can watch them work here and here.) Locked into racism/misogyny and conspiracy theories, Scott locks on to Poppy, though he won’t admit it. His crush gives her the creeps yet he remains a creature of pathos to her. He may be a proto-fascist and once-and-future batterer but he remains a human horror.
As is Noriaki. Both of them, by the way, bare their pique and pride in convos in cars. (Kiarostami once mused about his faith in auto-revelations. Experience had taught him front seats of cars are the best locus for real talk. Once a duo start rapping, neither party can step off, though each can look away if a dialogue gets heavy which, in turn, licenses more intimacies. Moreover, after confessions, nobody is forced to double down by holding his or her respondent’s gaze.)
Human beings find it hard to resist chances to reveal themselves. Which is a gift for an artist like Kiarostami, who attended closely to his actors (like someone in love?). Barack Obama is another public attender which is one reason why he remains the One when it comes to the art of politics.
In Obama’s Mandela address he insisted (as ever) the party of hope must try harder to hear those who aren’t with them. He keeps revising that Call which keeps it fresh. (I’m flashing on how he implored Howard grads before the 2016 election to get “inside the head” of the “middle-aged white guy who you may think has all the advantages, but over the last several decades has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change, and feels powerless to stop it.”) But Obama did more in Johannesburg than re-up on his position that vital democracies rest on conjoint communication not echo chambers and comfort zones. He took all the time he needed to talk through the nature of the current world conflict between forces of progress and Reaction. He didn’t reduce that conflict to Trumpery since there are plenty of authoritarians who rely on lies.
Obama linked their fake news feeds with fear-mongering. But his affirmation that “progress is real”—“the world has gotten steadily freer and healthier and wealthier and less violent and more tolerant”— didn’t mean he was down with “the new international elite” or “the professional class that supports them” (though he acknowledged many of them were fans of his). He sounded like he was channeling Christopher Lasch circa The Revolt of the Elites when he parsed the moeurs of moneyed cosmopolitans:
They live lives more and more insulated from the struggles of ordinary people in their countries of origin. And their decisions – their decisions to shut down a manufacturing plant, or to try to minimize their tax bill by shifting profits to a tax haven with the help of high-priced accountants or lawyers, or their decision to take advantage of lower-cost immigrant labor, or their decision to pay a bribe – are often done without malice; it’s just a rational response, they consider, to the demands of their balance sheets and their shareholders and competitive pressures.
Obama pointed out “these decisions tend to be made without reference to notions of human solidarity.” His critique of class-bound rationality and tolerance reminded me of Takashi’s live-and-let-live stance. There’s no doubt Obama grasps how easy it is to slide from “Whatever will be, will be” to “Whatever is, is right.”
Obama has been accused repeatedly of being a scold. He’s also been criticized for his “inability to express anger, or even to look like he feels it.”[2] I’ve never been bugged by Obama’s tendency to abide by a brotherly canon of cool. Still, I’ll allow his critique of tolerance sent me back to Frank Rich’s fiercer attack on those “Vichy Democrats” in New York who enabled Trump’s rise. (Rich’s use of the V-word, by the way, echoes its deployment by First’s Charles O’Brien who referred to America’s post-9/11 “progressive” apologists for Islamist terror as “the Vichy Left.” It was the watchtower effect of O’Brien’s words that moved Marcus to expound on the work of “real intellectuals.”)
In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, Rich focused on how Roy Cohn and Trump cemented an axis of evil in the 70s and 80s. Their various schemes were facilitated (and celebrated) by a mad wide range of New York pols and media players. Rich exposed their acts of collusion. (Who knew it was Si Newhouse—Roy Cohn’s best friend from high school—who made sure Random House brought out The Art of the Deal, thus giving Trump a national profile.) Rich’s piece climaxed with his take-down of Hillary Clinton’s riff in her post-election memoir, What Happened, on the Clintons’ appearance at Trump’s wedding, which the Don claimed was proof of a quid pro quo since he’d contributed to her senatorial campaigns:
“He was a fixture of the New York scene when I was a senator—like a lot of big-shot real-estate guys of the city, only more flamboyant and self-promoting,” she writes of Trump. “In 2005 he invited us to his wedding to Melania in Palm Beach, Florida. We weren’t friends, so I assume he wanted as much star power as you can get. Bill happened to be speaking in the area that weekend, so we decided to go. Why not? I thought it would be a fun, gaudy, over-the-top spectacle, and I was right.”
Even so, everything else about this breezy and disingenuous paragraph epitomizes the honor-among-celebrities ethos of the bipartisan New York Establishment that helped Trump get where he was by 2005.
Rich then dug into the malevolence that made Trump’s flamboyance different from that of other big-shot real-estate guys. He ended by returning to an episode that’s presaged every one of Trump’s new lows:
The Clintons might have also heard how in 1989 Trump, running amok in a trademark rage, tried to help toss the city into turmoil by taking out a full-page racist ad in the four daily papers demanding a reinstitution of the death penalty for “roving bands of wild criminals” after five black male teenagers were charged (erroneously, as DNA would confirm in 2002) in the rape of a white female Central Park jogger.
Rich landed on the right horror story. It’s one that recalls an old school racial divide that once distanced Secretary Clinton from her old boss who just gave that Mandela lecture in South Africa. Rich’s essay, though, didn’t allow Obama—or those of us who miss him madly—to get away clean since Harvey Weinstein—Trump wedding attendee and “another major New York player in Democratic politics”—was in the scrum. Rich detailed how Weinstein’s chief flack, Mathew Hiltzik (who gave Hope Hicks her first job!) also worked in various greasy capacities for the Kushner family, Ivanka Trump, David Pecker, Kirsten Gilibrand, and Hillary Clinton…
Weinstein was further protected by his contributions to Democrats, led by those to the Clintons. Everyone in New York who had professional dealings with him knew he was a pig and a bully, much as they knew about Trump. But the parties, screenings, and star schmoozing were too much fun for Democratic politicians to resist.
Obama gave into the ooze too—his daughter, Malia, worked as an intern at Weinstein’s company last year. Obama was a Chicago guy, not one of New York’s Vichy Democrats, so it’s possible he was unaware of Weinstein’s bad rep. Then again, Obama has elephant ears. A proposition of Takashi’s in Like Someone in Love comes to mind: “When you know you may be lied to, it’s best not to ask questions. That’s what we learn from experience.”
Abbas Kiarostami had his own experience with Weinstein whose old company, Miramax, was the first–and worst—firm to distribute one of Kiarostami’s films outside Iran. As Jonathan Rosenbaum angrily pointed out back in that day, Miramax didn’t so much distribute Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees, as dump it.[3]
It occurs to me Kiarostami’s encounter with Weinstein might have taught him early not to expect too much from The West. Intolerance remains a problem from hell—in the mullahs’ Iran and wherever fundamentalists rule—but a liberal mogul may be an enemy of promise too.
Notes
1 https://www.firstofthemonth.org/nothing-new-under-the-sun/
2 https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/us/265442/alexandria-ocasio-cortez
3 https://www.firstofthemonth.org/players-club-a-lovers-prayer/