Film: Certified Copy (French: Copie conforme)
Running Time: 1 hr. 46 min.
Directed By: Abbas Kiarostami
Written By: Abbas Kiarostami
Certified Copy is a 2010 drama film by Iranian writer and director Abbas Kiarostami, starring Juliette Binoche and the British opera singer William Shimell, in his first film role.
The film was a French majority production with co-producers in Italy and Belgium.
The dialogue is in French, English and Italian.
The film premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, where Binoche won the Best Actress Award for her performance. Critics have been mostly positive and compared the film to Journey to Italy by Roberto Rosselini.
Short Summary:
The story is set in Tuscany and focuses on a French antiques dealer, (Juliette) who spends a day with the writer of a recently published book on the value of copies in art. The couple appear to have met each other for the first time that day, but as the film progresses it is left unclear as to whether they are a married couple attempting to rekindle their relationship by pretending to be strangers, or strangers playing the part of a couple.
Review:
Certified Copy is the deconstructed portrait of a marriage, acted with well-intentioned fervour by Juliette Binoche, but persistently baffling, contrived, and often simply bizarre – a highbrow misfire of the most peculiar sort. It looks like the work of a sophisticated director.
The film is set in Tuscany, where visiting British author James Miller, played by newcomer William Shimell, is giving a reading from his latest book, entitled Certified Copy. Binoche plays a French antiques dealer, invited along to his talk, who is fascinated and a little nettled by the man’s provocations. She has offered to give him a local tour, where James turns out to be prickly and difficult; their conversations are tense, and the proprietor of a local cafe tellingly mistakes them for a married couple. The idea appears to amuse them both, and without ever remarking explicitly on what is happening, the pair embark on a kind of exploratory role-play, in which Binoche finds that she can speak with unaccustomed freedom to her “copy” husband about the crisis in her marriage, and finds that this virtual-reality intimacy may be more powerfully real than the real thing. Binoche reacts with exasperation to James sometimes, but never asks about his own life or marital situation, and seems in her way quite as weirdly solipsistic as he is.
It is a film that is pregnant with ideas, and for aspiring to a cinema of ideas Kiarostami is to be thanked and admired. But the simple human inter-relation between the two characters is never in the smallest way convincing, and there is a translated, inert feel to the dialogue.
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