What more can I ask for than a movie that opens with a moderately attended author reading, especially when it's about a book of art theory called "Carbon Copy" (in a movie called, in English at least, Certified Copy), and especially when half the the movie will be spent in closeup on Juliette Binoche's lovely, funny face, and when more or less the entire movie will consist of two people talking, often (as in so many of Abbas Kiarostami's movies) while driving?
It's been a decade or so, I think, since Kiarostami's made a theatrical feature, and a decade or so since I've seen one, and most reviewers (e.g. Stephen Holden and Glenn Kenny, although Kenny also recognized some continuities) talk about what a curveball it is from him and cite all sorts of antecedents in European art movies. But aside from the shift to Europe and an Oscar-certified European film star, it seemed like homey territory in many ways for him (and for a fan like me). There's the talking, and the driving, and the dry, ancient hill towns, and most of all, there's the person so invested in a work of art and its creator that she (in this case--it's a he in the great, meta-twisty Close-Up), inserts herself into the creator's life, demanding some sort of connection between the creation and the life it represents.
That last plot sketch is one way to read this shifty, shifty movie, in which a relationship of apparent strangers becomes unsettlingly intimate by the end. It's a movie you can search for clues to construct a "true" reading, but I'm more interested in a movie's proliferation than in pinning it down. So let's catalogue some pleasures, aside from Binoche (and one sign of the obtuseness of James Miller, the critic played by William Shimmell, is that he seems nearly ignorant of her charms, charms that, as this IMDb reviewer recognizes, Kiarostami almost deliriously appreciates). There's the Tuscan hill town filled with brides and grooms: copies, of course, of each other. (Adding a further layer was that the hill town reminded me of my own honeymoon in Tuscany...) I envy moviemakers for the ease with which they can fill their scenes with such weighted images while hardly having to speak of them. Movies have backgrounds in ways that books don't (or one has to work especially hard to manufacture them).
For my own professional purposes I have an eye for moments when plot kicks in, so I most loved the scene where the couple gets coffee: both for the way the proprietress steps into Binoche's life and seems to quite literally shift its narrative, and for that shift's first revelation, when Binoche, suddenly tearful at a story of five years before, says a sentence I tried hard to remember at the time but goes something like "I wasn't well in those days." (Watch part of that scene in the third clip here. In watching it again I realized that the teary revelation, unlike in my memory of it, actually comes before the local woman intervenes: just further blurring of any pattern you might impose on the picture.)
And then, speaking of proliferation, there are the characters' (and actors') easy transformations from English to Italian to French (all ironed out into subtitles), which was one of the odd side pleasures of Carlos: perhaps the most (or only) likable aspect of the murderous Jackal was his brilliance in shifting on a dime from language to language. One enjoyable eruption of this in Certified Copy is in the first scene, the author reading, when James, who otherwise claims no Italian, even through all of his metamorphoses during the picture, shifts into what sounds to me like fluent, r-trilling Italian when he makes a short tribute to his Italian translator. (Perhaps he pulls this off so easily because he is played by a man, making his film debut, who is best known as an opera baritone and no doubt has plenty of experience enunciating Italian, even if he doesn't speak it.)
What really happens in Certified Copy? I'm not quite sure, and emotionally, it didn't really matter to me. "Symbols" and "themes" and such "literary" fodder tend to get looked at skeptically these days, but Certified Copy is a lovely example of how a movie can exist almost entirely (don't forget Binoche) on the energy and pleasure those nutrients can provide.
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