‘Certified Copy’Rating: Not rated.Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.Note: In Italian, French and English, with English subtitles.
“Certified Copy,” Abbas Kiarostami’s lovely labyrinth of a film, is best seen without having read reviews that divulge what the director reveals – or hints at – only gradually (this one won’t). The two-hander’s teases and twists carry an electric charge, particularly in the riveting performance of Juliette Binoche, by turns dithery, fevered and open-hearted.
She plays the unnamed French owner of an antique shop in Tuscany, raising a tween son who challenges her every move – when he bothers to look up from his video game. The film’s action consists of the day she spends with a British author, James Miller (opera singer William Shimell), whose new book gives the film its title. A sort of middle-aged “Before Sunrise” unfolds, meandering and talky. But from the get-go these characters’ colloquy is a mutual provocation, not a romantic seduction.
A baffling undercurrent of accusation keeps their exchanges off-balance and out of sync, although on the surface they would seem a good fit: two good-looking, independent, ferociously intelligent people. In his screen debut, Shimell is perhaps too much of a buttoned-up cipher, but he conveys a level of preoccupation that suits this role.
Like its central couple, the film is a volatile mix of the studied and deeply felt. James’ book of art criticism concerns the overvaluation of “authenticity” when nearly everything – human behavior as well as our artifacts – is a form of reproduction, an attempt to copy or recapture what has gone before. The film itself can be viewed as an outsider’s reproduction of European art-house cinema, complete with a character called She.