Certified Copy – Starring Juliette Binoche and William Shimell. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Rated M. Originally published February 20, 2011. By Simon Miraudo.
At a café, a waitress mistakes the duo for a married couple. But they don’t correct her. In fact, they begin to bicker as if they’ve actually spent the past fifteen years resenting one another, hiding feelings from one another, and most devastating of all, falling in and out of love with one another. Are they just having a bit of fun with the wait staff? Their role-playing spills out into the streets of Tuscany, and their “improvised” barbs seem to cut close to the bone. Are they truly a married couple pretending to be strangers in a last ditch effort to spice up and save their marriage?
Perhaps they actually are strangers trapped in two crumbling marriages, taking advantage of their street theatre to air their grievances with their significant other. It’s telling that in the film’s final half, Binoche and Shimell rarely share the frame. DOP Luca Bigazzi separates them, and we witness each of them holding a conversation with an unseen second party. They’re not yelling at each other, but rather, engaging in separate arguments, either with themselves or their not-present partners. (Bigazzi plays a couple of nifty visual tricks on the audience that I wouldn’t dare spoil here). Or maybe they are just a couple of really devoted art critics, who have taken their debate about the value of “copies” and “reproductions” to its logical conclusion. As if you couldn’t already tell by the large number of rhetorical questions I’ve posed, I’m clearly divided on the issue. Regardless, all hail Binoche and Shimell for walking the tightrope and doing the impossible – maintaining characters who are purposefully vague, yet painfully stripping themselves bare in the performance.
I’m ashamed to say that I’m not entirely familiar with Kiarostami’s back-catalogue of films, although I understand his Taste of Cherry (which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes) also takes viewers on an enigmatic journey with many interpretations of the ending possible. After watching Certified Copy, I can’t wait to devour his earlier works and have my perception of reality and my understanding of cinematic narrative turned inside out. Sounds like a fun Friday night!
There are multiple ways to read Certified Copy; none wrong. That’s the beauty of it really. It is just like the art at the center of the film’s debate – different things to different people. It also reminds us that love – the great work of art – is just the same; perhaps even a projection of our own hopes, fears, expectations, guilt, dreams, regrets and imagination. Even within one relationship, it can be a million things.
4/5
Check out Simon’s other reviews here.
Certified Copy arrives on DVD July 20, 2011.
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