Thoughts on CERTIFIED COPY
as a contributor to Reverse Shot, i was asked to participate in their annual rundown of the year’s best films. i was assigned to write up Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, which was convenient as it might be my favorite film of the last 10 years (it topped my list last year). here’s what i wrote:
“With Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami has devised the rare masterwork born from humility. Refracting the real-time romanticism of Before Sunset through a hall of winking mirrors, Kiarostami makes fakers of us all, himself included. In a small Tuscan village, a woman whose name we never learn (Juliette Binoche as “She”) meets a man whose name we can’t forget (opera star William Shimmel as “James”). She serves as his guide for the afternoon, and prompted by the “misunderstanding” of a local restaurant owner, the couple begins to act as though they’ve been married for fifteen years. It seems simple enough, but then there are chinks in the armor of their ruse, small moments of dislocation that compel viewers to distrust their own interpretations. Are they strangers or merely estranged? Are they a legitimate couple, or a convincing forgery of a well-worn human relationship? Kiarostami wouldn’t presume to know the answer, but he’s fascinated by the difference. Curiosity is his ultimate muse, and it’s one he has no interest in satisfying. He’d rather play cartographer than detective, following his two bickering leads as they map the divide between originals and their copies, all roads leading into intersections.
We ferret for clues as we watch Binoche and Shimmel go through the motions, the latter’s relative acting inexperience underscoring the layers of performative behavior at work. Art and life are conflated into infinity, as people themselves are reinterpreted as copies (James refers to her child as a “Copie conforme”), and a parade of identical brides reveals our rituals as forgeries of a lost ideal, doing so without discounting their value. Eventually, the question of legitimacy is overwhelmed by the massive emotional wallop of whatever it is that we’re watching, endless layers of mediation pierced by the sort of longing that can’t ever be entirely fake if it feels this real.”
