Life really is what we make it. Literally. The mind edits – speech, smell, images and memory – with lightning speed and with little trace of the spliced edge. Life is edited to perfection to enact a world which represents how we feel at a particular moment in time. Who hasn’t had the experience of encountering an object that is a lot smaller as an adult than we remembered as a child or of the stunningly beautiful or handsome first date who disappointingly begins to look incredibly ordinary the second time around?
In
‘Certified Copy’ Juliet Binoche pairs up with renowned baritone-turned-actor
William Shimmel on a day’s excursion through a small Tuscan village. Shimmel plays somewhat successful English
author, James Miller, who is in Tuscany shopping his latest book on the
underappreciated value of copies of great works of art. Reasonably, he argues that reproductions are
pieces of art unto themselves and that their status as ‘copies’ is no different
from the manner in which ‘the original’ copies the image of its subject – be it
a pretty woman or a bowl of fruit.
Binoche’s
character is a fan of his. Well, actually she’s an enamoured fan who arranges
to meet up with and to spend the day with Miller following his book talk. He signs several books for her to keep and to
give to friends and family. The two go
off on a drive to nowhere in particular.
In fact, their journey serves as a metaphor for the aimless journey that
the film seems to be taking. But patience,
as they say, is a virtue. Iranian
director, Abbas Kiarostami, has little
tolerance for the cinemagoer who is unable to take a few breaths and to ease into
things.
Binoche is a
woman in conflict. She begins the film
in conflict with her son and through a clever juxtaposition of harmless
pretense and mild psychosis is soon in raw and spirited conflict with the
author, Miller, a man she barely knows. He
agrees to go along with Binoche in bringing to life a seemingly harmless
mistake a café owner makes in assuming that the couple is man and wife. Binoche makes the most of it by taking us on
a journey showing what it would be like if Miller were really her husband. Or is it that Binoche shows us what would
happen if her character’s actual husband were there? I’m not quite sure. Kiarostami leaves the cinemagoer marvellously
questioning what’s fantasy and what’s real.
Has Binoche’s character made a certified copy of her husband through
psychological projection?
In leaving
us guessing, the director does us a favour.
Kiarostami allows us to see that we can inhabit the same space as others
and not see them at all. We use them. We
shape them. We love them. But in the
process, we lose the dividing line between reality and fantasy. In fact, Kiarostami questions whether there
is such a dividing line. As I write this,
I’ve reached the conclusion that I don’t even think Binoche’s character had a
name. The character is someone specific
yet everyone at the same time. As
another example of borderline psychosis, the film dialogue moves seamlessly
between Italian, English, and French in fantasied but paradoxically real
expression of the ability of individuals to communicate efficiently with others
who don’t share important aspects of the their world, like language.
I know this
is all very confusing, but I think it’s supposed to be. ‘Certified Copy’ is boring yet engaging,
concise yet full-length, full of meaning yet about nothing at all. In short, the film is life itself. Go see it.
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