Abbas Kiarostami’s first narrative feature in English breaks free of the language he’s mostly worked with in his long illustrious career as an internationally celebrated filmmaker, but it also takes him out of the native landscape he’s strongly captured in films like Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us, as well as its people. Certified Copy brings him to a land no stranger to cinema, with characters all too familiar. A middle-aged British author and a French art store owner, convening in the Tuscany countryside, sipping wine and cappuccinos, discussing love, philosophy and the merits of art. A stuffy and stagnant premise, for sure, but you wouldn’t know it from watching these two.
The man arrives in Italy to promote the Italian translation his book, an essay not very well-received in his own country yet celebrated in this foreign place (something Kiarostami probably knows a thing or two about), on the indistinguishable worth between an original painting and its copy. Its title mirrors the film’s; its controversial subtitle: “Forget the original, just get the copy.”
The woman, a curious admirer reluctant to be a fan, leaves him her number and arranges an unofficial meeting of professionals. On his last day before returning, the man suggests they tour the countryside and get coffee before he has to catch the night train. They get to know each other, they argue about their outlook on life, and then a coffee shop owner mistakes them for husband and wife. Sensing a playful opportunity, they spend the rest of the day roleplaying as a couple married for 15 years—and then the flirting begins.
Before long, they’re so absorbed into these roles that they’re fighting, arguing about marital incidents that never even happened. So fervently and sincerely they lock horns that we begin to wonder if maybe we’d missed something and the meeting of two strangers at the beginning of the film was the charade.
Juliet Binoche drips with sensuality with such ease without ever betraying the character’s identity as an unglamorous, fussy, animated mother of a teenage son. William Shimell, a known opera singer who’s never acted on film before, is clearly outmatched, but he does a lot to keep the man a captivating enigma; and the last shot of the film, a silent close-up of his inscrutable face, continues the film’s wide range of questions past its closing credits.
A cruder man than me—not me, the beacon of tact that I am, but a man very similar to myself—would rename the film A Tale of Cocktease. The seduction comes about very slowly, very elaborately, that it builds and builds until you can no longer see any other outcome for the two except the obvious, and then...
Of course Kiarostami never comes to the conclusion of whether or not a copy is just as good as the original. The more they talk about art, the less the film is about it. We hear no excerpts from the author’s book, and the one time he talks about its content, during the press conference that opens the movie, Kiarostami lets him drone on and on as he moves the viewer’s attention away from his words and onto Binoche’s face. There lies a puzzle: is she simply trying to concentrate to what he’s saying, or is she smitten? Answers are few in this movie, and figuring out what they are is as intriguing as Binoche’s countenance in this scene. It’s why the relationship between them hangs as a mystery.
Yet for as long as they kept it up, this non-relationship, this fake, this copy of a relationship, is as believable and exhilarating to watch as any other romance we’ve seen onscreen. Why shouldn’t it? Because we know that they’re not really a couple? We walk into every romantic movie performed by professional actors knowing that fact. Like so many of Kiarostami’s films, it strikes a spotlight at the line between fiction and reality. The memorable parting shot of Taste of Cherry shows Kiarostami and his film crew, revealing the facts behind the narrative. Certified Copy works in the reverse. The facts are laid bare, and then we’re required to abandon them.
Or as the author argues to his fake wife before their imaginary nuptial: “Isn’t the original Mona Lisa also just a copy of the girl Leonardo Da Vinci painted?” Either way, it's an incredible work of art. You could say the same of this film.
"Certified Copy" opens March 11, 2011 and is not rated. Drama, Romance. Written by Abbas Kiarostami. Starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimell.
