“Like Someone in Love” starts out rather obliquely. The confusion is eventually cleared up — in a rather surprising way — but the sense of ambiguity and unsettlement remains to the film’s very end. It’s what makes this elegant picture both confounding and irresistible at once.
I hate to be the one to clear up the confusion, rather than the filmmaker, but it would be impossible to say what the film is about otherwise. Akiko (Rin Takanashi) is at a restaurant, talking on her cellphone, while her companion is away from the table. We can’t see her, but we can hear her. And she’s clearly talking to a jealous-to-the-point-of-obsessive boyfriend. She puts a girlfriend on the line — sitting at a nearby table — to prove she’s not out with another man. She is, though, but it’s not what you might think: The man is, to put it bluntly, her pimp.
