Abbas' Identity Game

If there is no fixed identity between people, then there may be more and deeper things that we can discuss. For example, we can temporarily become relatives, and let me listen carefully to your heart and understand how much you want to be loved and hugged. This may seem difficult in front of strangers, but when the feeling comes, in fact, everyone has almost a moment, and can play a role that they are familiar with. And Abbas's films are just a few that are interesting in the field of identity games. For example, there are the early "close Up"; the recent "Copie conforme"; and the new work of 12 years, "like someone in love". The reason why I don't use the Chinese translation is because the translation of "Like a River of Love" seems to literally invert the original title. Chinese idioms seem to use a story to describe a feeling; Abbas's original intention was to use a feeling to describe a story. This paradoxical feeling, everything is focused on the word "like". That said, the story starts out without a plan. Everything is temporary and inadvertent. All characters build a loose relationship from feeling, and destroy all previous relationship identities from looseness. The girl, Akiko, was originally planning to review tonight and prepare for the sociology exam tomorrow. But unfortunately, it was arranged to pick up an "important guest". So in desperation, he came to the home of a retired university professor. The old man welcomed Akiko warmly, and chatted with her a lot about himself like a granddaughter. When I woke up in the morning, I drove myself to take Mingzi to the university for the exam. However, Akiko's boyfriend, who had been waiting at the school gate for a long time, mistook them for a grandfather-grandson relationship. So he got into the car and started chatting with the "paradoxical" grandfather about his decision to marry Akiko.

That's how the story goes. The boyfriend calls the professor uncle, the professor calls Mingzi his granddaughter, and Mingzi calls the professor his grandfather, and the professor has also upgraded from a whore client to a family member who is serious about Mingzi. All the relationships that are on the verge of triggering only stem from the collision of a misunderstanding. But the problem is that this misunderstanding turned out to be serious in the end, so that everyone acquiesced to this absurd identity game by accident. You are him, he is me, and I am whoever you want, I am like whoever you want. It's like a random shift in Russian roulette, and every word I say is for the object of my imagination, not for yourself. Between people, real communication begins to be replaced by false feelings, and in the end, you suddenly realize that yes and no is not a problem at all, but the problem is, what is the real identity. I mean, can you really know that you are communicating with others in your life as you really are, rather than maintaining a relationship "just like this" as a role model?

It's a tough question, like I'm at a loss as to who I am and where I come from. So in most cases, everyone is actually like Akiko and the others, in the ocean of people, playing an identity game that almost came true. Lying in the arms of a stranger; kissing a friend who is not a lover; falling in love with a prince of love songs you never knew; trusting someone you met online. Logically, these are all absurd things, but with the loneliness we enjoy, it has become the only password that can unlock loneliness. Just like bathing in the ocean of emotions of self-consciousness, starting from the metaphysics of self-imagination, I came to a world of nothingness where everything is just likeness. Here, reality is a symbol without an outline. Even the most affectionate hugs are just "lovely" intoxicated fantasies, full of romantic impromptu emptiness. Or, since we believe that God is dead, aesthetic metaphysical games are the only meaning to people. So Abbas's identity game, on the other hand, is shaking the wind chimes of human nature, and seems to want to tell us the inevitability of loneliness in today's absence of belief. It's just that Tokyo's street corners remain silent and boring. The retired professor standing on the windowsill could only be stoned to death by her boyfriend who saw through the illusion.

So the glass shattered on the ground, just like our dream, and we still have to wake up after all.

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