Those searching for a gentle, rambling hangout movie should look no further than Certified Copy. Those searching for a film that makes them question the very fabric of art and reality should also look no further than Certified Copy. Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s scenic Italian travelogue winds down Tuscan alleyways and philosophical rabbit holes alike, inducing a feeling of confused wonder. It’s like waking from a dream, when one briefly perceives the world with a different and beautiful logic.
Though Certified Copy was Kiarostami’s first feature outside Iran, it doesn’t show. His clear, realist style is as transporting here as it is in the dust-swept hills of Tehran in 1997’s Taste of Cherry and the Iranian village Koker in Where is the Friend’s House?, a decade earlier. Renowned for imbuing simple narratives with unknowable complexity, Kiarostami is masterful in crafting this cinematic enigma, as straightforward as things may first seem.
We begin with a talk given by James Miller (William Shimell), a cocky, accomplished English writer, who has travelled to Tuscany to market his most recent book – also titled Certified Copy. Why, questions James, should the value of an original artwork eclipse that of a forgery, if the forgery is just as good if not better? Why is the beauty and worth of an object, or even a person, contingent on how it is perceived?
At the talk, a French woman (the eternally magnetic Juliette Binoche) sits down in the front row. She whispers to an event organiser and passes him a note, perhaps her card. She shoots daggers at her 11-year-old son fidgeting on the sidelines. Not long after, she stands and exits the room.
Later, James finds himself walking down stone steps into the woman’s basement antique shop. They greet each other as strangers, and soon embark on an aimless drive around the countryside, during which the nature of their relationship and their lives begin to subtly shapeshift. The woman’s name is never revealed.
The duo spend the film roaming through postcard landscapes, dipping in and out of churches, coffee shops and sunlit courtyards. They talk and talk and talk – about art, culture, love: all the important things. Their conversations share DNA with the long, scenic dialogues of Jesse and Céline in Richard Linklater’s dreamy Before trilogy, and the comedic discursions of Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan in the Trip series – all of which capture the delight of wandering, with a friend or a lover, through beautiful European towns. And yet Certified Copy also offers something else. Half-hidden within Kiarostami’s picture is a riddle.
Though the man and woman begin as courteous, awkward strangers, the tenor of their conversation soon takes on a strangely personal tension. Pointed bickering and mysterious flashes of emotion hint at a secret history between the two aesthetes. Binoche and Shimell’s performances, as the only signifiers of the film’s mercurial shifts, are captivating, their expressions fleeting finely between politeness, humour and sudden melancholy or irritation.
Along these cypress-lined roads lies a path towards a hidden reality. The two strangers (or are they lovers, or former flames …?) drift between different versions of themselves, all of which seem – paradoxically – both inscrutable and authentic. Which of these identities are real, and which are counterfeit? And is that a question even worth asking?
Expect no ready answers. Instead: a unique and revelatory thesis, a new way of perceiving the world. The pleasure of this film lies in its mystery; in the fickleness with which our perceptions of cultures and relationships can change; the ease by which authenticity, or truth, can be reduced to an irrelevance. Come for the scenery, stay for the head-scratcher.
Certified Copy is streaming on SBS On Demand in Australia, Curzon Home Cinema in the UK, and AMC+, Mubi and Criterion in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
