Certified Copy

2010 drama

Rating: 17/20

Plot: While visiting Italy, an author meets a single mom who owns and antiques store, and she agrees to drive him around for some sightseeing.

My assessment of the work of Abbas Kiarostami was off. I'd only see two of his movies--Taste of Cherry and Close-Up--and while I knew that he can be meta and blur the line between film and reality, I went into this expecting something a little dry, straightforward, maybe minimalist. Early on, I was comfortable enough. The motivations of the two characters as they begin this journey together wasn't clear. Was she going to attempt to seduce him or was there something about him or his writings that had wronged her, causing her to have some sort of vendetta against him? Was he bored, horny, a combination of bored and horny?

For the first chunk of movie, I felt I had a handle on this Before Trilogy-esque developing romance or whatever it was, and I was trying to piece together themes having to do withoriginals and copies, living simply, hedonism, the nature of art (cypress trees and Coca Cola), and children as miniature philosophers. So at a key moment when a kind of twist appears, I was surprised, and I ended up watching the rest of the movie with my mouth wide open.

Of course, that's usually how I watch movies anyway. It's why I stopped going to theaters. Kids kept tossing popcorn into my open mouth as some sort of childish game, and on two separate occasions, I nearly choked.

So I guess I had forgotten how avant-ornery Kiarostami could be, how playfully tricky. Because during the rest of this movie, I got a stress headache from trying to figure out exactly what I was seeing, what clues I likely missed, and what it all meant.

I still don't know! But I haven't stopped thinking about it since, finally figuring out that I'm not supposed to understand the nature of these two characters' relationship or at which point in the movie they're playing some elaborate game of grown-up pretend.

Juliette Binoche is something else. Every time I see her in a movie, I'm surprised at how good she is, how she very well might be one of the greatest actresses who's every lived. She's emotionally all over the place, one of those performances that seems like it would take a lot out of an artist. She won best actress at Cannes for this, and I imagine whoever decides the winners of those sorts of things probably only needed to see the one scene where she puts on lipstick to decide that. William Shimell compliments her very well in what apparently was a first movie role for him. Kiarostami gives us intimate looks at these two, a lot of shots having them speak directly to the camera. And while the sights on their sightseeing tour really are beautiful, the focus is rarely on any of them. Heck, even a key statue that becomes the center of the dialogue at one point is never really even seen.

So a faux character study with plenty of philosophical red herrings, twisty and filled with mirrors and repeated lines and doppelgangers, Certified Copy is a reminder that I need to start paying more attention to the filmography of Abbas Kiarostami. And not underestimate how ornery he could be.