Director/Writer: Abbas
Kiarostami
Starring: Juliette Binoche,
William Shimell
“Certified Copy” is one of
those movies that I fear writing about, because I feel I cannot express what is
good about it without making it seem like the type of movie that only a few
people will appreciate. It’s a romance of sorts, but nothing that you’d expect
from one. It’s a philosophical movie. It’s philosophical about art, about life,
and about love. See, I’ve just lost half my readers.
The film stars that French
intellectual beauty Juliette Binoche and William Shimell. I fear I can’t say
too much about their characters, because discovering exactly what their
relationship is has much to do with the movie’s power. At first you really can’t
figure out what brings them together beyond a mutual appreciation of art, and
then it’s revealed just why these two people are spending time together and
everything changes.
In some ways, “Certified
Copy” is a lot like Richard Linklater’s movies “Before Sunrise” and “Before
Sunset” in the way it follows a compacted period of time with two people who
spend it talking about everything. The conversation is a more limited in “Certified
Copy” and the whole movie is a lot more deliberate than Linklater’s movies.
Writer/director Abbas Kiarostami is very precise with his camera and his
dialogue. His camera rarely moves when the two people are engaged in
conversation, but his shots are very consciously framed.
Much of the conversation
involves the professional counterfeiting of art. But, it isn’t really about art
so much as it is about how people present themselves to each other in
relationships and how they present themselves to the world around them. We all
seem to have these fairly universal ideals about relationships. Do they stem
from environment, or do they spring from some universal need in our collective
human consciousness? The movie isn’t really about that either, but these are
the types of questions their conversation inspires. I didn’t get any of you
back, did I?
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