Certified Copy
Copie conforme
Copia conforme

In his first feature made outside of his native Iran, legendary filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (Where Is the Friend's Home?, Close-Up,Taste of Cherry) delivers a captivating meditation on love, authenticity, and memory. The luminous Juliette Binoche (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Three Colors: Blue, The English Patient) gives her finest and feistiest performance yet, opposite the British opera singer William Shimell in his first film role. The two play a couple who spend the day walking through Tuscan villages and the countryside discussing matters ranging from authenticity in art to the complexity of interpersonal dynamics. The exact nature of their relationship is both unclear and also directly at the heart of this enchanting picture.

The less said about the movie’s storyline and narrative construction the better. This is one of those films best to just let wash over you. It is most certainly not a mystery to be solved; it’s an experience to give oneself over to. Such is the case for all of Kiarostami’s work, but Certified Copy is quite a departure for this filmmaker. Not only is this his first movie with a European setting, and characters who speak in French and English, it's the first Kiarostami picture to feature a major international movie star like Binoche, rather than the non-professional actors he usually favors. And, until now, all of this director’s films have dealt with politics either overtly or subtextually. Certified Copy touches on gender politics, but overall the movie feels unconcerned with anything as timely as contemporary culture or the current state of the world in any particular region. This is a movie distinctively out of time, in most senses of that term. 

That out-of-time sensation is where devotees of this director will feel on familiar ground, as most of Kiarostami’s later pictures operate outside the standard narrative language of a linear timeline. And all of his movies are quiet, understated accumulations of tiny observations and details that can slowly, often imperceptibly, build into a profound cinematic experience, as this one does. Many of his plots can be summed up completely in a single sentence, but nothing in that description would convey the viewer’s experience or the multitude of thoughts, emotions, and ideas this director conveys in his best work.

It’s fascinating to see how Kiarostami is able to cast the same hypnotic spell on a Western viewer in this cinematically familiar picturesque Italian setting with a well-known actress as he does in the more otherworldly (to Western audiences) settings of dusty sunbaked villages outside Tehran, with children and other “real people” as his stars. I use to think that part of why I found Kiarostami’s work so distinctive was because I was so unfamiliar with the specific environments and cultural norms of Iranian society—even though I’ve seen a good deal of work by his younger contemporaries Asghar Farhadi, Jafar Panahi, and Majid Majidi, whose films are usually set in more urban Iranian settings.

To be certain, Certified Copy is a film about two people talking, like Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre or Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. Almost the entirety of the movie is focused on the characters discussing, flirting, arguing, pontificating, and engaging all kinds of playful and serious verbal exchanges. Yet nothing about the picture feels theatrical or novelistic. This is a purely cinematic experience that could not work in any other medium, and it envelops the viewer primarily on an emotional level rather than a cerebral one. Kiarostami’s unobtrusive camera frames his protagonists in compositions that are somehow simultaneously telling and mysterious, just like his Mobius strip of a screenplay. Subsequent viewings of Certified Copy get us no closer to answers to any of the questions raised by the film, yet they reverberate more deeply with repeated visits to the strange day these characters spend together. There is as much to discover in what Kiarostami doesn’t show us, and what his characters don’t tell us, as there is in what we see and hear.