Certified Copy (2010)

"Certified Copy" is a film of great beauty and mystery. The first thing that strikes you about it is how real it feels. Not just its plot, not just the acting, but also the dialogs - they are laced in the anguish, hope, fears, disappointments and joys of the life we all live, everyday. To try to explain what the film is about it to rob it of its sense of poetic irony but all you need to know about it is that it revolves around two people who strike up a conversation after meeting in picturesque Tuscany. Binoche plays the part of a woman, apparently a single mother, who owns a small antiques store. She meets a visiting British writer, James Miller (opera star William Shimell, in his debut) who is there promoting his new book, a treatise on copies in the art world. The two decide to meet later for a discussion dinner, but what at first seems like mundane musings on the every day quickly takes a turn when it appears to us that the two are familiar to each other and perhaps even might have met. We are never told, not directly at least, whether this is the case, but numerous hints are dropped; a joke that Miller shares for instance than Binoche seems to have heard before, then an anecdote that is all too familiar to her and which can relate to, about the replica (or copy!) of the David statue outside the Academia in Florence. Dialogues therefore drive the film. Binoche's description of her sister and her problems with stammering are so succinct, so clairvoyant that when we almost feel we know her as well and later in the film, when Binoche uses the pseudo stammering 'J-J-J-James', it tells you so much about her. If you listen carefully to the dialogs and are intent on picking up inflections, body language and facial expressions the film is richly rewarding.

Credit for this greatly goes to director Abbas Kiarostami for his use of formalism combined with minimalism and tight framings. Let's just say he knows where to place his camera and what to get out of his actors. His closeups of the faces of his two leads is both intrusive and revelatory. In the finest example of this, and in an outstanding unbroken single take, he lingers on the beautiful, ever luminous face of Binoche as she powders her face and applies her lipstick. Ordinarily the scene should have been inconsequential, but in the scheme of things it is both a private moment with the character that Binoche plays and fine testament of Binoche's ability. She is outstanding throughout - shifting from one extreme to the other, crying and laughing, sometimes at the same time. In the films most heartbreaking scene, she asks Miller if he noticed whether she dressed up for him that day. When he answers that he didn't she responds by telling him how she was able to pick up the scent of his new perfume. This might be nothing more than the deconstruction of all cross gender relationships, yet we learn so much about both of them while being kept at a distance. Because we can only infer what is going on, but still not be entirely sure about it, the film envelops us into its puzzle completely. At a time when many directors, most film and almost all actors are stuck doing the same things, "Certified Copy" feels like the real thing.

Fmovies: Euro intellectual recession-time story? I recommend Copie Conforme because of and in spite of the difficulty in watching it. The difficulty resides in the multiple layers involved in the relationship of the two protagonists, not to speak of the three languages that they both speak in various circumstances. The more the the action evolves, the less we seem to understand the real nature of their relationship. What we do know is that those two have a problem of communication. It is this struggle of seduction/rejection, with setbacks and all that make it worth watching. Atmosphere and the man-woman tension is what keeps it going. The filming is impeccable, with lovely scenes of Tuscany, excellent camera, and the great work on surrounding noises, which I believe replaces any music at all. The acting is also very fine, with Binoche deservedly getting a major Cannes Film Festival award.

If you're familiar with the movies of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, this is a big departure from his usual work. Shot in Italy with Juliette Binoche and some dude, it's basically a romantic comedy, but nothing like Hollywood would ever produce (well, it actually reminds a little bit of Before Sunset by Richard Linklater, but miles away from the Julia Roberts/Sandra Bullock avenue).

It's really enjoyable with unexpected progress of the story (unexpected especially if you're brainwashed by certain type of movies about male-female relationships). It has room for interpretation, everything is not explained and it lets the viewer bind the remaining threads. It's also funny and I found it quite intense. It held my attention and actually felt about ten minutes shorter than it really is. I have to admit that I'm a big fan of intelligent movies about male-female relationships. Long well written and acted scenes with just a man and a woman talking don't turn me off.

The formal control of the shots by the director and the cinematographer are masterful. There are those long shots that Kiarostami has used before, but used masterfully in the context of the story, and not in any "look at me, Mom, I'm sculpting in time" -art house tedium.

I talked with couple other persons who saw the movie, and they said that they didn't like it. But let me tell you that it's really good.

Certified Copy fmovies. If you have seen Under The Olive Tree, Kiarostami's master piece from 1994, you might find Certified Copy to be the continuation 25 years later on a different continent. Here he left Iran for Western Europe because Binoche could not have done this in Iran. A twisted, touching, thoughtful relationship story that plays with what is a copy and what is an original, what is reality and what is imagination. Beautifully filmed and Binoche is at her best. The many languages spoken between the protagonists - none from Iran - just confirmed for me the many levels of a relationship, the confusion and misunderstandings you are confronted with, no matter where you are. Definitely worth seeing and talking about with intelligent friends.

I like it when a film really understands its characters and as we follow them we can see their foibles and their follies and their humanity being opened up and challenged. The Coen Brothers do this with impeccable black comedy in the framework of a thriller, as in Fargo or Barton Fink or Burn After Reading, whereby the entire tenuous structure of people's lives begins to collapse and we are left perfectly conflicted with sympathy and delight in how this will play out. Then there's the Before Trilogy, and Journey to Italy, which quietly follows its characters learning about themselves as we are too. Certified Copy plays like a condensed version of the Trilogy, and has some of the 'lost in a landscape bigger than themselves' exploration of Journey, yet this film never feels as in control or as vitally connected to its ideas as those films do. Many things are discussed, and layers revealed, but it's just not entirely convincing.

Not entirely convincing, but an excoriating watch nonetheless. When this film was finished, I felt like I had just witnessed an entire relationship, from the first fruitful seeds, to infatuation and love and friction and wear and decay, and in a sense I had because that is essentially what the two characters of the film take us through. The film begins with William Shimell, playing the role of modest and charming British academic who is promoting his book in Italy. The idea of this book gives the film its title and what the whole film begins to play around with: the copy. The copy, and it's relation to the original, its authenticity, and whether one should invest any time in an original if a recreation is believable. He would answer 'no' to that last thought. Juliette Binoche appears at his speech, leaves his translator a note, and the next day he appears at her small museum/exhibition/trinket shop, artistic debate is continued, and thus their journey begins. The boundaries of conversation between two people who are seemingly strangers soon dissolves and they are soon fluctuating between moments of bitterness, delight and contemplation, and soon enough in what appears to be a bizarre role-play, the assume the role of a married couple and any façade that they try to wear is soon being flayed.

Binoche is utterly captivating and her award for Best Actress at Cannes is entirely deserved. She is seemingly inexhaustible, communicating in Italian, French and English and losing no degree of vulnerability, bitterness or magnetism between the languages, and she has a remarkable way of kind of softly inhabiting any given situation but being able to turn caustic and uncomfortable with immediacy. There are moments when the characters are sitting opposite each other in conversation and they are speaking directly into the camera, and when Binoche does this it's never less than transfixing.

Shimmel, for a first time actor is for the most part quite grounded and reserved, but it's with him that the film often feels at its flattest. He's the more outwardly ruminating intellectual, always approaching things with a contemplative thought, and it often feels like the film is struggling to maintain a deep thought, as if in fear of being mocked for being nothing less than poetic. Maybe that's the way the character is supposed to be, but all his affectations get tiring. He comments on Eucalyptus trees being so totally unique, how each one has its own shape and definition and being unlike the other one, and as truthful as it might be, it's just a comment tha

I came across the film when researching a piece I was writing on Plato's ideas of beauty and aesthetics. Although Plato isn't for everyone I thought this film really helped my students understand some of his central concerns relating to the difference between an idea, a reality and an imitation. In our class discussions on Plato's notions of Mimesis and Diegesis, this film greatly helped.

The film forces us to wonder to what extent the relationship between the two central characters is real, or an imitation of a once real relationship. It asks is a real relationship any better than a certified copy i.e a fake relationship where both parties pretend it is real. That is the central question - the value of the authentic versus the value of the fake.