Essay on Abbas Kiarostami's LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE for Reverse Shot's ‘Best of the Decade’ symposium

“Kiarostami is not an angry filmmaker; he is not even a very emotional one (he once told a French journalist he had never once cried in the cinema). He is, like Takashi, serene. He would not conceive of using his work as a form of activism. The irony of his ostracization by the authorities in his home country of Iran—an irony so profound that it would be amusing if the circumstances were not so deplorable—is that neither he nor his films ever attacked the Iranian government, its ideology, nor the enforced lifestyle of its inhabitants. In an echo of (fellow painter) Eisenstein’s artistic dilemma, Kiarostami’s austere, limpid life stories were banned because they were so artfully and subtly presented, and by trusting the audience’s imagination they left so much unexplained, that the authorities did not understand them. So, they reasoned, they must be subversive.”

I was thrilled to contribute this essay on one of the most luminous films of the 2010s. Number 18 on Reverse Shot’s ‘Best of the Decade’ poll: LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE.