Certified Copy is a truly cosmopolitan affair, with a goddess of a French leading lady (Juliette Binoche), a British opera singer (William Shimell) as his leading man, an Italian location and crew, and a meandering, introspective, fascinating conversation that slips between English, French and Italian. Kiarostami penned the screenplay himself, with Massoumeh Lahidji "adapting" and translating. Binoche plays a French-born antiques dealer and single mother in Italy (she's never called by name in the film and is identified as "Elle" in the credits, which in French means "she"), at once pulsing with life and worn down by it. Shimell is James Miller, a British author and philosopher in Italy for the release (in translation) of his new book on art, authenticity, and value. He arrives at his press conference a calm, confident man, all reason and unflappable self-control, even when she arrives late and carries on a distracting conversation of gestures with her hungry, bored son. She arranges a kind of date with the handsome and assured author, driving him through the alleys of her small town through the countryside to a nearby village to view an "original copy" as they debate the meaning of authenticity. They can't agree on anything, but there is something there.
James is every inch the intellectual philosopher and enjoys the discussion as a kind of exercise, all romantic ideals and philosophical ideas, while Elle, far more emotionally invested, draws from her practical experience of living in the world. Over the course of the afternoon they flirt, spar and grow old together. When a chatty trattoria proprietor mistakes them for husband and wife, they simply segue into the roles and the outing becomes a portrait of a marriage fifteen years on. The transition is not exactly sudden or shocking -- in some ways, it's almost imperceptible, thanks to the graceful long takes and the easy rhythms Kiarostami's style of heightened naturalism -- but the tectonic shift is like a narrative earthquake that completely shifts the ground beneath their feet and our engagement with this characters. This is not some first date game from a nervous couple indulging in a little joke. Their whole relationship shifts with it: awkwardness and nervous chatter gives way to the rhythms and comfort of old habits and the disagreements of earlier conversations harden into frustration and exasperation over long-standing aggravations. As the afternoon date becomes a wedding anniversary, old patterns of arguments play out all over again in tetchy exchanges and emotional collisions, or so we can gather from the resignation of their responses.
What could have been a neat trick or a modernist exercise is given resonance by the rich pageant of experience onscreen. The reflection on the windshield during the drive out of town becomes a river of brick and sky flowing between the actors, suggesting the enormous gulf between the two strangers as they get to know one another while offering one of the most sublime images of the director's career. A parade of hopeful young newlyweds and stooped old married couples (including the great French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière as a chatty old man in a piazza) criss-cross the path of the couple along the way. They could be echoes of their life story, before and after, haunting their present. The emotionally guarded James actually becomes agitated in the presence of the young couples glowing with the optimism of early love, as if he has already lived through his own disillusionment. And in a way he has, if you see Certified Copy as the cinematic equivalent of a Picasso cubist portrait, presenting experiences from different periods in a life in a single narrative and a single day. Kiarostami, always attuned to the environments of his characters, even opens in the bright glow of the morning sun -- the beginnings of a romance? -- and ends in the dimming light and gentle shadows of evening for the sunset of this relationship.
The conceit of the story could have come from the same culture of intellectual adventure in the French and Italian new waves of the sixties, fitting enough for Kiarostami in his first European production. But it's also a return to Kiarostami's own interests in cinematic engagement with people and stories. In the decade between The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) and Certified Copy, the director returned to documentary, delved into experimental and avant-garde filmmaking, and shot a series of shorts for anthology films. He comes to Certified Copy refreshed and invigorated, creating a film with a surface of naturalistic performances, graceful long takes, and a sensitivity to place, culture, and the passing of time, while under the surface quietly upsetting all of our expectations and preconceptions. But never at the expense of his characters. Binoche brings a passion for life in her early scenes that calms into a heartbreaking optimism stirred through the sadness and resignation of her later scenes, and her quiet conviction in reviving those early passions collides with Shimell's shift into irritable, condescending arrogance and emotional intransigence. It's tragic with a small "t," an intimate and very human kind of failure: after 15 years, the fallible people in this fragile relationship still don't understand each other, and James, the introspective philosopher who uses words and ideas as armor for his feelings, is still a prisoner of his restraint.
The "certified copy" of the title refers to painting and sculpture and the plastic arts -- Why do we value a reproduction less than an original and what does authenticity even mean? -- but resonates just as effectively with the art of filmmaking and its relationship to reproduction and recreation. Kiarostami reminds us that movies are not a mirror held up to life, nor a reproduction or a recreation, but a mediated work that restages and manipulates the reality in front to the lens, just as he did in films like Close-Up (1990), Through the Olive Trees (1994), and Taste of Cherry (1997). And as in those films, he creates a gap between character and representation that allows us to relate to their lives and emotions and relationships from a different, but no less engaging, perspective. Kiarostami is as daring and adventurous a filmmaker as there is today when it comes to challenging our expectations, but it is always in the service of exploring and celebrating the humanity of his characters. Beautiful and painful and mysterious and strangely real, this is no copy of life, certified or not, but it is an authentic work of art that grapples with life on a profound level.
Both the Blu-ray and DVD editions feature the rare 1977 Kairostami film The Report, his second feature, making its home video debut. The film was made before the Iranian revolution and the original elements were destroyed by the new government, but a single print survived, with English subtitles on the print. Kiarostami himself agrees that the quality is poor, but it is the only source for this historic film.
Also features the well-made 52-minute Italian documentary Let's See Certified Copy, with offers a wealth of interviews with Kiarostami, Juliette Binoche, William Shimell, and the crew (in Italian, English, and Farsi with English subtitles), and a new 16-minute interview with Abbas Kiarostami, conducted in Paris in 2012 for this release. The accompanying 22-page booklet features an insightful essay by film critic Godfrey Cheshire.
For more information about Certified Copy, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Certified Copy, go to TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
