Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's new film Like Someone in Love, is set in Tokyo, has Japanese actors and a song by Ella Fitzgerald (the movie's title is a gift back to the vocal legend).
If this isn't a "global" product, then what is?
Ian Buruma does an excellent introduction of the movie. In his blog, he reminds us that the globality of it all notwithstanding, a certain Japaneseness inheres in the kind of love that's portrayed.
In a nutshell, the movie is about a young university student who migrates from the provinces to Tokyo to study. She falls into dire economic straits in this most expensive of all cities and resorts to prostitution. One evening she visits the home of a client, who is also a very old ex-professor. She enters his premises expecting the usual, but the old man doesn't want to have sex or anything sexual with her. What ensues is the movie's core, and Buruma aptly names it the "contingency of human intercourse."
So Japanese! And so electrifying that an Iranian has been able to render something like this seamlessly (according to Buruma)
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