Christopher Culver Abbas Kiarostami's last few films were made outside his native Iran, and his 2010 effort CERTIFIED COPY is set in the colourful towns and countryside of Tuscany. Its two main characters have arrived in Italy from elsewhere: a Frenchwoman (never named, and played by Juliette Binoche) has lived in Arezzo for several years now, running an antique shop, while James (William Shimell) is an Englishman invited to lecture on an art history book that he has written.As the film opens, James is in fact giving that lecture, speaking of how a high-quality copy of a work of art may said to be better than the original. He soon meets the French antiques dealer, and the two spend an afternoon touring the nooks and crannies of Tuscany. With the Frenchwoman's awkwardness and Jame's suave, confident air, Kiarostami is clearly riffing on the romantic comedies of the last two decades. But then the film takes a magical-realist turn: the two begin speaking as if they have been married for many years already. The apparent relationship between the two continues to evolve and morph over the course of the film's 106 minutes (and what seems to be for them just a Sunday afternoon spent together) as Kiarostami broods on the nature of marriage as the years go by: people change over time, a husband and wife will eventually be rather copies of their youthful selves, but will they be copies better than the originals, or a sad mockery of their youthful idealism? For anyone who has been married (people who haven't may not get much of the film), CERTIFIED COPY is a moving evocation of the rigours of staying together with another person, and the shadowy undercurrents of even apparently happy unions. However, I was ultimately left with mixed feelings. Starting this film with a highly didactic lecture was, in my opinion, a bad choice: no audience wants to feel lectured to right off the bat. Then, the script is a bit too conversation-driven, becoming in parts a logorrhea that will overwhelm even viewers who can understand its trilingual French-Italian-English dialogue (it's probably horrible for those who rely on subtitles). Kiarostami could have trimmed the dialogue without sacrificing any part of his message.Before making this film, Shimell had been known only as an opera singer on the stages of Europe. He manages to make the leap to film actor quite well, with all the subtlety that his role requires -- indeed, I know someone quite like James in both background and personality, and Shimell's depiction bore a resemblance so close it was chilling. Juliette Binochedeftly manages to change her mood and bearing instantly to signal another shift in the film's intrigue. In spite of the European setting, much of Kiarostami's personal technique remains (as well as general aspects of the Iranian New Wave like only the voices of minor roles heard, with the characters themselves not shown on screen).

Gray_Balloon_Bob 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.

sidhu-karna What is the plot? What is the purpose? What is the relation between the actors? Well as you watch the movie, one understand its an experience. It is just as enjoying the moment, and not worrying about what comes next. Because, next can be anything as the story on the surface does not appear to be logical. It raises too many questions and doesn't care to answer them. It starts being like "Before Sunrise". Charming leads, great dialogues, superb imagery. It deviates from there. Where as Before Sunrise is adventurous, "Certified Copy" is mysterious.The acting is top notch. Both the lead actors take us into the moment. As you see it, each moment has a different back story and the acting conveys it in a single expression. It's like you pause for a moment and then get the whole background of what it's meant.This is my second Kiarostami movie after "Like Someone in Love", and it is just as enjoyable as it.

bandw There is no action except talking, unless you figure that two people getting in and out of a car is action. The movie is essentially one long conversation between James and a women, billed as "Elle" (Juliette Binoche). James is an art historian and Elle is an antique dealer specializing in art. James has just written a book, "Certified Copy" which asks why good reproductions should not be equally as valuable as originals. The book appears to be one of those that takes an idea of some merit and intellectualizes it to death, like asking if an original of anything exists, or if we are only DNA reproductions of our parents, or if a tree is not to be considered an original work of art? The conversation struck me as only a slight cut above what you might hear in a typical college dorm.Halfway through we are thrown a curve ball. While at a restaurant James steps out to take a phone call during which the proprietor dispenses wisdom to Elle about male/female relationships, like how a wife should be happy that her husband works, since work is necessary for a man, allowing the wife to live her own life. The proprietor mistakes Elle and James for husband and wife and Elle does not dispute that assumption. From here on I was left to deduce whether James and Elle had known each other in the past and were play-acting at the beginning, or weather they had just met and were play-acting after James' return to the restaurant.Perhaps a point is being made about the relationship between perception and reality, or that maybe perception *is* reality. There was a scene between Elle and her young son Julien in a café where he asks her why James did not sign his book using Julien's surname. This question so upsets Elle that she runs out of the café. I thought that there must be some significance in that scene. Does James have an alias with the same surname as Julien? Is James Julien's father out of wedlock? I could not ultimately make any reasonable inferences about this scene, though I feel it is of importance. In the end I found the message being delivered, if there is one, so muddled that I lost patience in trying to figure it out. I found James to be a cynical, pretentious, obnoxious, and petulant pedant. The main positive is Juliette Binoche who is almost always worth watching no matter what movie she is in. While her performance is not without interest here, it was not enough to save the day for me. The production values are high and there are some nice scenes of the Tuscany countryside.