3 Stars
“Art is not an easy subject to write about,” says the author (William Shimell) featured in “Certified Copy.” Writing about the film itself is not easy either, if only because we don’t know what is real and what is fiction.
The British author meets the French owner of an antique store (Juliette Binoche) as though they were perfect strangers. But once the pair leaves the Italian town of Arrezo in her car and heads to a nearby town, our perspective changes.
The pair talks with an odd intimacy, critiquing each other with a familiarity that seems to ache. She finishes his joke, he comments on her family with a sense of certainty only a loved one could offer, and yet there is an odd sense of ambivalence.
Do they know each other? Are they the bruised and broken couple that they seem to embody the longer the day wears on? Or are they strangers faking a haphazard intimacy in the hopes of achieving the smallest piece of love?
This is both the blessing and the curse of “Certified Copy.” The audience can’t develop any real affinity for the characters when the truth is synonymous with fiction. It becomes this web of conversations, from which barely anything can be deduced.
But still, a small part of us wonders why we continue to watch with a dull sense of fascination at the almost nonchalant and rhythmic demise of a marriage or the birth of a new friendship.
Director Abbas Kiarostami navigates the dichotomy between truth and fiction with precision, casting our view at reflective surfaces and having the characters look into the camera as though it was a mirror. In this way, the complexity becomes more unmanageable as the characters also seem to be looking for something within each other, within the world, and within themselves.
The author tells his audience that his “intention is to try and show that the copy itself has worth in that it leads us to the original.” It is these words alone that send viewers struggling to understand the couple’s dynamic — can we apply the lessons of art to the truth of love?
If imitation is the best form of flattery, maybe love isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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