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Certified Copy review
:. Director: Abbas Kiarostami
:. Starring: Juliette Binoche, William Shimell
:. Script: Abbas Kiarostami
:. Running Time: 1:46
:. Year: 2010
:. Original Title: Copie Conforme
:. Country: France
:. Official Site: Certified Copy
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For his first film shot outside Iran, beside a documentary film (ABC Africa) and a short (Tickets), Abbas Kiarostami defines the different stages of a couple's life with an intimate style that stands apart form the rest of his filmography. A British writer has to give a lecture in a small village in Tuscany. In the audience, a woman with a strong interest in his work, but having to slip away due to her son's impatience. Later, the man and woman meet and decide to drive off for the day. The route they take leads them on the trail of a story they may have already lived. How to separate truth from falsehood, fact from fiction? As a virtuoso magician, Abbas Kiarostami multiplies trompe l'oeils and his commentary on the superiority of the copy compared to the original gives him the opportunity to investigate human nature, rather than nature, which usually prevails in his films. Do not be fooled by appearances, this is the watchword of this film, as modern as it is elegant.
While one imagines that the couple has just met, Abbas Kiarostami reveals new challenges and seduction gives way to a desperate attempt to reconquer the other. The journey backwards in this love story combines the intensity of the interpretation by Juliette Binoche, who is at the top of her game. In a restaurant scene where she sits down with her companion, she goes through a whole range of emotions: mannerisms, love banter, then pain and anger against the indifference on the man's imperturbable face, which the Iranian director incessantly studies. Truly impressive, Binoche reinvents herself under the eye of the camera to become an incarnation of the universal woman.
The modernity of its directing gives Certified Copy its uniqueness and depth. Playing with reflections and overlays, and to prevent reverse shots, Kiarostami gives life, on equal par, to the two fundamental principles of his film: the feminine and masculine. For his screen debut, the baritone William Shimmel (who had played in Mozart's opera Cosi fan tutte, directed by Kiarostami) is really convincing. Elegant and broody, he lets go of nothing in front of the woman who finally gives in to him in the hotel room where they spent their wedding night. Meanwhile, the two protagonists will have met a young couple and an old one on their chaotic route. The genius of Kiarostami's directing lies in the physical space created around his couple, which lies between these two ages. That is to say at the critical moment when passion gives way to a more balanced form of love, before old age. This gives the film its universal poignant character and is expressed by a verse from a Persian verse quoted by the director: "The bare garden, who can deny its beauty?". Difficult in any case to deny the beauty of Certified Copy, born in the garden of feelings and art where anything can bloom again.
Sandrine Marques
Translated into English by Christina Azarnia
 10
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