It’s all in the mustache? Okay, it’s mostly in the mustache. Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone In Love, opening Friday for one week at the Egyptian, gives you plenty of Takanashi Rin’s hesitation, plenty of hesitation in nervousness. So much of the director’s new film, shot in and around Tokyo with an all-Japanese cast, depends on one party asking for something that the other party does not give.

Ms. Takanashi develops her own vocabulary (and with ensuing minutes, her own dictionary) of ducked glances, lip twitches, whispers, and butting her forehead at her interrogator to avoid eye contact. She started out as a model and I try not to hold that against her. But she held somehow onto a vital secret: how not to pose for the camera.

But I was talking about the mustache, wasn’t I? The mustache belongs to Okuno Tadashi, age eighty-something. He plays a writer and retired professor. His whispery inflection scratches along its bottom, like someone who inhaled a lot of chalk dust over decades. He’s supposed to be Takanashi’s john, but the director elides whether they actually do the things a prostitute and a john are presumed to be up to.

In other hands this would, yes, end up hokey, but the film avoids that with a two-pronged attack. First, there’s the other main ingredient, Kase Ryo (who actually logged some time in Bellevue, growing up) as the volatile fiancé, loyal to Takanashi but loyal like a jut-jawed bulldog who can’t stop jumping on his mistresses’ finery. He’s got old-fashioned ideas about men and women, so his lady’s nervouser than “normal” about telling him how she brings home the bacon.

Second, mystery. Kiraostami likes to cut cross-sections into people’s lives, but he doesn’t like to backtrack or future-trip. He wants you to figure things out for yourself and if you have to surmount that to make your own meanings, that’s okay too. He’s one of the few directors (try finding one inside Hollywood) who trusts his viewers to have a brain: It’s as gobsmacking as that. Oh yeah, and the title tune, from the professor’s genteely-aged stereo, comes from Ella Fitzgerald. Sweet. Savor.