At last year's Cannes Film Festival, Juliette Binoche walked home with the Best Actress Award for her turn in Abbas Kiarostami's latest flick, Certified Copy, and a couple weeks ago, that film stole into American movie theaters after an extensive period perusing the international film festival circuit. Its lengthy residence in film-festival-country probably owes a great deal to the film’s enigmatic subject matter, which really defies delineation, though, I suppose if I were to take a shot at it, I would say the film is predominantly preoccupied with the originality of art (is a painting an original work of art or merely a presumably interesting copy of its subject? Something straddling those lines, anyway). There’s really no point in sketching an outline of the “plot”, since, essentially, none exists.
How Kiarostami wrestles this conceit into its halfway-coherent form in the film truly dazzles the mind. He raises it first in William Shimell’s character, James Miller, an “expert” on art and culture, whose most recent book, Certified Copy, tackles the very subject. He then lurches into a strange rendezvous between Miller and Binoche’s unnamed character where they tussle over the idea in somewhat hostile terms (well, at least in Binoche’s case; her character admits to believing Miller’s work as bad and stupid). When they settle down for a cup of coffee sometime in the midst of a yellow Tuscan afternoon, they’re relationship suddenly transforms inexplicably. Before they were author and “fan” discussing the author’s latest effort, but now they’ve become 15-year-married husband and wife, and they argue over unappreciated anniversaries, near-fatal road trips, neglected and infuriating children, an entire grab bag of matrimonial problems. At first it seems like they’re merely imitating their idea of a long-married couple, a copy, if you will, but eventually their prior relationship fades like an old light bulb and they inhabit and flesh out these new roles into some kind of strange reality.
Is their marriage true or an imitation, a copy? Kiarostami provides no answers, and maybe that’s not even the question we should be asking ourselves. It’s interesting, during their coffee-break in the middle of the film, Miller describes his inspiration for his book, a relationship between a mother and son that bears a striking resemblance to the relationship Binoche’s character shares with her own son, and it begs the question whether the first half of the film was merely an imitation of Miller’s mother-and-son story, because after that, Binoche concocts a wild account with the prioress of the café they’re at of her marriage with Miller, and the two (Binoche and Shimell’s character, Miller), as previously mentioned, proceed to live out that story like its reality with very little regard for what came before. Are the stories the two tell original works of art or copies of what the two witnessed or conjured from their imagination? And are the relationships between Binoche and her son, and Binoche and Shimell, original, or copies of the stories they told?
This is getting a little convoluted and, as I said, the film does nothing to help unsnarl all the questions it tangles together. It bears mentioning that the acting here between Binoche, a lauded veteran, and Shimell, a newcomer to film acting, is superb. The film clocks in at 106 minutes, which might seem longer for those with short attention spans. Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that those who risk a viewing will come out wondering what to make of it all.
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