Certified Copy is a Mind-Twister

 

CERTIFIED COPY (2010)

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

MK2 Diffusion, 106 minutes, PG-13

★★★★

 

 

 

 

The New Wave movement is synonymous with France, but it was a global effort by auteurs more interested in making serious film than in mass-audience “movies.” Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) was part of the Iranian New Wave and continued to make challenging films there, even after the 1979 Islamicist revolution. He got away with that because his films are largely devoid of overt political content, though his work was so enigmatic that Iran’s theocracy forbade screening them there.

 

Kiarostami has been compared to auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Vittorio De Sica. De Sica was Italian, the land in which Certified Copy is set, though its principals Juliette Binoche and William Shimell are French and English respectively. The latter is James Miller, a British writer of a book titled Certified Copy; Binoche an unnamed antiques dealer. (Some reviewers give her name as “Elle,” unaware that elle is French for “she.”) Miller is on a book tour that takes him to Tuscany, where his distracted host (Binoche) attends his talk and buys six copies of his book. Miller’s book is indeed about copies and the validity of things viewed as authentic. It parallels French intellectual Jean Baudrillard whose theories on simulacra and simulacrum hold that cultural forces “construct” reality through systems of symbols and signs. Miller cast doubt on whether “truth” exists in any independent fashion.

 

If you made it past the last sentence, you know that Certified Copy is a mind-twisting film. We don’t know if what is happening between Miller and Binoche is real or simply role-playing by two intellects playing mind games. Nor can you draw definitive conclusions from what you observe. Binoche is either Miller’s handler for the day or his wife and the mother of their difficult son.

 

Strangers for a day or estranged? The first part of the film suggests strangers. Miller must catch a 9 pm train but agrees to an afternoon excursion to an outlying village where she shows him a painting that was later exposed as a forgery. She insists it’s nonetheless lovely but he walks away saying he has written his book and has nothing more to say about the subject. When pressed, he acerbically snaps that even the Mona Lisa is a copy (of the real woman DaVinci painted).

 

Things degenerate from there. They go to a café where the café owner assumes Miller is Binoche’s husband, discourses on the need for them, but wonders why he has lived in Italy for so long but can’t speak Italian when she can. When he returns from the restroom, they shift into the roles of bickering spouses in a dead relationship. He constantly asks her to translate external conversations, yet we hear him speaking Italian in the first part of the film She insists there is beauty in all things, including the town square and a couple getting married; he demurs. Even more strangely, she tries to rekindle their “marriage” by walking him through memories he cannot recall. She even tries to seduce him but is rebuffed. Stay, she implores; he insists he must catch his train. 

 

What do make of all of this? First, any way we parse it, we must concede it is brilliantly acted. Binoche won a Best Actress award at Cannes in a role that tightropes between the possibility she is a wronged woman or that she is madder than March hare in a poison ivy patch. Shimell is also superb as an acidic cynic. That’s all the more impressive in that he is an opera singer, not an actor. (Kiarostami liked to cast amateurs.)  

 

The second thing to bear in mind is Miller’s thesis. If all things are copies, this applies also to films. They are the ultimate artifice, so why must they follow the strictures of how reality is perceived? I return to the question of strangers or estranged. Why must we choose? Why not both? Or neither? At the risk of sounding like a bad Philosophy 101 inquisitor, what is reality and how do you know?

 

Kiarostami offered images and situations that are as much a poetic montage as a film. Poetry can also be difficult to unravel, but how sublime when we decode one that brings us pleasure. I can’t promise you will love Certified Copy but I am confident you will think about it long after you get past shouting, “WTF?”

 

Rob Weir