Certified Copy Review (Spoiler Filled)

This will be a spoiler filled review but I am pretty confident that this film is fairly spoiler proof. That being said, it is available on Netflix Watch Instantly and I would highly recommend that you watch it before you read this.

I feel as though I recently turned over a new leaf in my life as an appreciator of art. I’m able to find the value in a smaller, quieter and slower film than when I was younger. I no longer dread melodrama. I used to be of the opinion that if something severe or tragic didn’t happen in a story than it wasn’t worth telling. I’m not really sure what happened to me but I seem to have developed the ability to become just as engaged in a small story in recent years.

Certified Copy is Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami’s newest movie starring Oscar winner, Juliette Binoche and opera singer, William Shimell. The film begins with author James Miller (Shimell) giving a seminar on his newest book in Tuscany. A woman in the audience (Binoche) gives him her address and they meet up the next day to spend the day together discussing art and the validity of its originality while she gives him a tour of the country-side.

At one point in the film, an observer in a café assumes that the couple is married and Binoche decides not to correct her. Instead, she carries out a long and detailed conversation with the barista about her husband and her unhappy marriage to him. This is the point that the film sparks. The couple spends the rest of the afternoon in the perceived charade of a long relationship. The discussions and arguments are heated and passionate and the details revealed make the audience wonder if there really is something more to these two.

It’s a great credit to the screenplay (also by Kiarostami) that he never tips his hand. If you listen to the conversations closely, all sorts of clues are given. But the more you think about them, all of these clues are circumstantial evidence; leading the audience in both directions simultaneously.

The weight of this film is not in the mystery or whether or not you can properly solve it. The point of this film is that there is validity in the emotions that are brought out by art and love. The originality of a piece of art or the authenticity of a relationship has little bearing on the audience’s response. Isn’t this the nature of any film using actors to portray a love story anyway? We all know that Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman are not really former lovers trapped in unoccupied Africa. But that doesn’t change the way your heart sinks when you find out that their lives “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Even this film could be considered pretty derivative. It’s sort of the lovechild of Orson Welles’ “F is for Fake” and Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad”.

Are they or aren’t they? Did they or didn’t they? These are a few of the questions you will find yourself asking over the course of this film. The beauty is not in the answers of these questions, but in the revelation that the answers don’t matter. The film was able to elicit an emotional response from you without ever revealing the true nature of the relationship on display.

If a copy of a painting or a sculpture has artistic value, then a copy of a relationship should have an emotional value…. If both of these premises are true, a film about both should be worth its weight in gold. This film explores art and its emotional relationship to its audience and the abstract concept of originality. This film probably makes the best case that true artistic value comes from its audience and not the artist. And the fact that this film says that so with such skill and elegance can only mean that it can’t possibly be true….