Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
(Not rated)
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The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is “a master of paradoxes,” said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. In his latest, a college-age Tokyo call girl (Rin Takanashi) falls under the protective wing of an 80-year-old john, but the story doesn’t go where a viewer would expect. Kiarostami remains as “interested as ever” in people’s tendency to play shifting roles, and he seems to find these characters so frustratingly malleable that his ending comes as “a slap in the face”—to them and anyone like them. He “revitalizes the ordinary” from the very first shot, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. After a bar scene that introduces us to the story’s protagonist through other people’s conversations about her, the bulk of the action takes place in and around cars, a setting that lets the city beyond the windshield contribute to “a sense of teeming ambient drama.” When a jealous boyfriend enters the story, we sense a familiar dramatic triangle taking shape, said A.O. Scott inThe New York Times. Yet because these characters remain mysteries to themselves, each ensuing shot “imparts a disturbing and thrilling sense of discovery.”
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