Copia conforme

"Certified Copy" is a film essentially cut in two. Both halves are lovely and when put together it makes for a remarkable whole work. It's a very simple film on the surface, the plot made up almost entirely of a day-long conversation between an author (William Shimell) and a woman (Juliette Binoche) showing him around town. The conversation begins with them being these strangers meeting for the first time, as they discuss his new book (the title of the film) and the theories he brings up within it. They discuss the significance of a copy as opposed to it's original and the film brings up a lot of questions on artificiality, within culture and within life. Questions arise as to whether or not every individual person is just essentially a copy of someone else, and this becomes absolutely fascinating. Then, everything changes. A waitress at a cafe mistakes them for a married couple and the two spend the rest of the day going along with this, playing a game that they are married and they go back and forth as an unhappy couple would.

Or was it mistake? It becomes clear that these people have some connection with each other, whether they are divorced, former lovers or something entirely separate, and the conversation becomes much more biting and intriguing. Writer/director Abbas Kiarostami keeps us gripped into this conversation, as these two ponder on the copies of the world, along with the tribulations of a marriage, what makes a good husband, what makes a good father and so much more. She attacks him for being such an absent father (is her son really his?) and he explains that sometimes one partner in the marriage just has to be gone and that's the way the world is. The film poses so many interesting questions on the world and leaves it up to the viewer to decide the answers for themselves. Each character has their own strong opinion, but Kiarostami never takes a side and tells the viewer the resolution. It's a powerful picture that keeps you thinking long after it's over.

Part of the power of course relies on the strength of the performances, and both of these actors knock it out of the park. William Shimell was the perfect choice for the distant, simple author. Juliette Binoche, however, steals the show, with an authentic and brave performance that ranks up with some of her absolute best. She is arguably the finest actress in cinema today, and has a grasp on portraying vulnerability that very few actors can come close to achieving. Within her you really see the pain of a woman scorned and the exhausting life led by a single mother constantly having to think of someone other than herself. She is everything here; emotional, strong, falling apart and beautiful. It's a perfect performance in a magnificent film. I feel like this is a picture that will only get better on repeated viewings, and it's still quite strong on the first one.

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.

The Pitch: It's like looking in a mirror, only… not.

The Review: Juliette Binoche has had a career spanning nearly thirty years, and for much of that has jumped between roles in her natural language and English. You might think that, with the supposed paucity of good female roles in movies, that there's not much left for Binoche to cover that she hasn't before, but here she gets to explore some new territory to Cannes best actress award-winning effect. In the process, she gets to cover a range of languages, not only English and French but Italian, but in this case there is a specific purpose to the variances of the language.

The set-up is simple: William Shimell plays James Miller, an British author on a tour of Tuscany where his work on originality in art has been better received than in his homeland. Binoche is the woman who comes to hear his talk, and the two are then drawn together in a discussion of his work. Once the two meet again, the course of the movie charts their discussions over the course of an afternoon, taking in the Italian countryside and engaging with a number of characters along the way who cause them to reflect on their differing viewpoints on Miller's work.

There's a turning point as we approach the halfway mark where one of those characters seemingly mistakes the pair for a married couple. What starts as a role play, set off by the misunderstanding, takes on more and more aspects, and eventually both the pair and the audience are lost in the drama. The whole movie reveals itself to be an intricate construct on this concept, almost every aspect of the theme, the performances or the setting playing with the motif of originality versus imitation. Reflections in car windows sometimes obscure the actors themselves, POV shots ask us to engage directly in the drama almost as a participant and this even extends to the leading pair themselves – Shimell is a renowned baritone, not an actor, and there is a slight but noticeable difference between his performance and that of Binoche, which almost feels like a copy of acting rather than being fully immersed in the role.

While this reinforces the concept, it does prevent the audience from fully engaging, being kept slightly at arm's length by the constant artifice. That's not to say that there's not a lot to enjoy here, with the confusions and the tensions making this verge on a romantic comedy at times. Despite the differences in acting ability, Shimell and Binoche make an engaging couple at times and as time wears on, you find yourself more keen to believe that the beginning was the illusion and that their relationship is real and not the copy. Much of the credit for this must be placed at Binoche's door, using the language differences to vary mood effectively, but also adding colour and emotion in all of the languages she uses. The only one here who's on familiar ground is director Kiarostami, who's explored these themes before but never to such mainstream effect – worth checking out if you'd like to engage your mind and your heart.

Why see it at the cinema: There is a very literal aspect of the visuals which runs throughout the course of the movie, which the cinema screen will allow you to fully appreciate.

The score: 7/10

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 that leaves you thinking 'And?' At other times the exchanges of these characters are scintillating, as when an innocuous pit-stop at a café becomes changes the gears of their relationship, and Binoche begins to furiously criticise his cool, charming bullshit-masquerade. The dialogue operates in these two modes, between fascinating and questionable, but never really finds its footing.

Abbas Kiarostami is clearly a man who knows exactly what he wants to do and how to do it, and at the jolly age of 74 all the wisdom and joy and despair he must have accumulated in his lifetime can be felt here, in the vivaciousness and the bitterness of the characters, in the way a camera can just sit and stay trained for minutes on end and let the people unfurl themselves, but sometimes it feels like all he is trying to much to do justice to all his collected experience in life. There's a shot toward the end with our couple standing in a courtyard together and just in front of them is a far older couple, man and wife, standing on the same side of each other, tentatively walking and supporting each other. The imagery is obvious but the connotations are beautiful, and it's the sort of a shot that could only have worked as aposiopesis to the journey preceding it. (Maybe that is the point)

So there was an ambivalence I felt throughout the film, but it's hard to dismiss something this lovingly made, as an expression of the melancholy of our relationships in life. There's a blustery and picturesque feel throughout this Italian journey that is hard to argue with.

All reviewers so far have either opted for 8 or 2. That is a sure sign that something is going on, I am willing to risk flack from all sides and say that Cerified Copy is was it is: a look at how we layer our relationships, an hour and forty minutes of conversations, broken with moments of silence and walking, and about two people who may or may not be in a some sort of relationship or connection.

It has originality - it will not be like other films seen recently in mainstream European cinema, there is little or no plot, or action, rather we dealing with conversation, and the state of the heart and the mind in a fiercely non-Hollywood fashion. This is a film about thinking about emotions, and is almost non-linear in its conversations and if that concept doesn't appeal then it may well not be viewable.

It is, however, despite itself, pretty mesmerizing - what will they say next? what other aspect of why relationships fail and succeed will be tossed into the salad? who are they? why the games? etc;

The conversations are both alienating and intimate, and have a "play-acting" aspect that allows the psychosexual aspect of how we adults explore potentiality to be examined in a way that is normally reduced to sexual tension and flirting on film. This is a film that demands attention - this is not dumb film-making. I recognize the conversations and the feeling well, but in a sense the connection is too contrived to be really successful - but it certainly touches that part of intimacy that is normally, at best, ethereal.

The setting of Chianti and a beautiful hot summer day, with cicadas and a wonderful small town to explore, lightens this - but it remains a film for philosopher romantics. It is, as others here have noted in better ways than me, film as film - here there are images and shots that work to compliment the alienation and solipsistic nature of the two leads.

A film about questions that offers few answers, it is certainly intriguing and if you are into human exploration and condition worth the effort to watch.