Film review: Certified Copy

Published on Thursday 2 September 2010 11:26

CERTIFIED COPY (12A) Directed by: ABBAS KIAROSTAMI Starring: JULIETTE BINOCHE, WILLIAM SHIMMELL, GIANNA GIACHETTI ***

THERE'S a moment late on in Certified Copy that encapsulates everything that's playful and maddening about acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's first foray into European feature filmmaking.

The scene in question revolves around an unnamed Frenchwoman, played by Juliette Binoche, and an English writer and cultural historian called James Miller (played by British opera singer William Shimmel). They're discussing a statue in a small Tuscan village. The woman loves it for its simplicity and suggests this is why lots of people come to see it. James, on the other hand, clearly thinks it's hideous and scorns her interpretation, even though it chimes somewhat with his own theoretical musings on art.

His condescension prompts her to solicit the opinion of another couple in the square to prove her point. After chatting to them for a few minutes, she brings James over, mentions his occupation, and asks the woman in the couple to repeat what she's just told her about why shy likes the statue. At which point, the woman, perhaps intimidated by James's occupation, immediately tries to intellectualise her reasons. With the context of the question slightly altered, she no longer seems able to respond instinctively and instead becomes so exasperated she ends up insisting the more simplistic interpretation was Binoche's own.

The point is that when it comes to art - and life in general - it's hard to articulate one's true feelings because to do so immediately takes that person out of the moment. It's a dilemma that Kiarostami uses the film to explore in a way that's both self-consciously smug and occasionally truthful. The smugness comes largely from the frequently pompous script and the rather stultifying execution of some of its ideas; the latter comes from Binoche's performance, which rescues Certified Copy from being a purely intellectual exercise.

The film opens with the improbably well-received Italian book launch of James's latest opus. The weighty tome, which gives the film its title, is an intellectual treatise on the psychological and philosophical dimensions of art that makes the provocative claim that a good copy, reproduction or forgery has as much validity as an original work because it confers the same basic pleasure on the viewer. In the audience is Binoche's character, who stays just long enough to give James' Italian translator a note, which, we're led to believe, results in them meeting at her antiques gallery the next day.

As he's due to leave Italy that evening, they agree to go for an afternoon trip during which playfully tense discussions about James' theories on art gradually take on stranger meanings as Binoche's motivations for initiating this rendezvous become increasingly obscure. Have they met before, are they actually a couple pretending to be strangers, or are they genuine strangers pretending to be a couple? The film keeps their relationship ambiguous, withholding key information and muddying the waters by having the people they encounter interpret and make conclusions about their relationship - reflections that alter how this man and woman then interact with each other.

It's here that the film proves simultaneously frustrating and fascinating. Kiarostami uses James' conceited discussions about the theoretical value of forgeries to clunkily interrogate whether or not it matters if the relationship we're watching is genuine. "If the emotions they're displaying are insightful and truthful, who cares," Kiarostami seems to be asking, "especially since film is, by its very nature, artificial?" That's a fascinating idea, but there's a difference between eliciting this kind of response through drama and trying to force it on us through endless didactic theorising. Kiarostami opts for the latter, which seems to be his way of showing off how clever he's being.

In plot terms, for instance, he's riffing on a very specific type of European cinema typified by Roberto Rossellini's neo-realist masterpiece Journey to Italy (in which a marriage in crisis is played out against the backdrop of an Italian holiday over a contracted timeframe). It's clear that on some level, Certified Copy's titular concept has been designed to allow Kiarostami to do this with impunity.

But compared to other modern films that have effectively updated this tradition - Richard Linklater's wondrous Before Sunrise/Before Sunset diptych immediately springs to mind - Certified Copy disproves its own thesis. Binoche - dancing between English, Italian and her native French - may subtly give us a sense of a woman with an understanding of what it means to live in the moment in real terms, but the film around her seems too caught up in trying to make us understand its underlying ideas. It's as if Kiarostami doesn't trust the story to hit us on an emotional level and wants us to talk about what it all means before we've even had a chance to take in and appreciate what we're seeing.