Love
is a many-morphing thing
An
unnamed woman (the gorgeous Juliette Binoche) attends a lecture by
author James Miller (British baritone William Shimell), with her son
as unwilling companion. Mr. Miller talks of his book Certified
Copy, which deals with the nature of reproduced artworks and their
originals (you can guess his attitude towards the whole issue by the
subtitle: “Forget the Original, Just Get a Good Copy”); the woman
brings six copies of his work which she plans to ask him to sign (to
certify, in effect), even if, as she admits to her son, she doesn't
like the book.
She invites Miller over to her shop in Arezzo, Tuscany, to a cellar store selling art replicas; the man is coolly interested, the woman nervy and flirtatious--it's obvious that they have some kind of chemistry going. The man wants to leave the city; they agree that she should drive him to the nearby town of Lucignano, half an hour away, just so long as (his only condition) he can be back by nine o'clock to catch his flight.
So
begins Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, his first feature
film outside of Iran, a teasing, sneakily funny, surprisingly tense
trip through the Tuscan countryside with a talkative, thoughtful
pair. From the first you notice odd details: the woman tells Miller
of her sister Marie, who believes that costume jewelry is as good as
real jewelry (Miller observes that what he expressed through a book,
Marie seems to simply apply as her life's philosophy); when Miller
adds a few words to his autograph of a copy for Marie, the woman is
annoyed. “Now she'll never change,” she fumes. You wonder if the
woman isn't overreacting; after all, she and Miller have only just met. Later in
a cafe the man talks of a mother and son on the streets of Florence;
the mother once in a while stopping to wait for the son, who never
hurries. “Sounds familiar” the woman tells him, a tear sliding
down one cheek--you remember that that was exactly what she and her
son had been doing earlier, having left Miller's lecture early (the
son sauntering along, the mother far ahead and looking back).
What
was that all about? Was the woman merely identifying with that woman
and her exasperating teen, or did Miller really see woman and son
from the window of his Florence hotel room? Have they met before, are
they pretending to have met before, or have the scenes been directed
in such a way that you can't definitively tell the difference? Kiarostami's
deceptively simple and placid film--basically a man and a woman
walking the streets of Tuscany--might seem like an elderly version of
Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995), or the chance couple
in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960). But Kiarostami
seems to be playing a far more intricate game (more intricate than
Linklater, anyway), forcing those of us with DVD players to rewind
and check what's really being said and done (pity the film festival
viewers, who only have their memories to fall back on)--one thinks of
the inexplicable shifts in mood and identity found in Bunuel's films
or David Lynch.
One
wonders: are the two role-playing, their roles cued by a cafe
waitress who has mistaken them for a married couple? Or are they a
married couple long since separated, who were playing at being
strangers when they met in Arezzo? One can argue one way or the other
(though I think it interesting that the two see each other long
before they actually speak to each other, and must have had a chance
to think their respective characters through); in this way the film
resembles yet another film: Ingmar Bergman's After the Rehearsal
(1984) where two people talk out an entire love affair, from
passionate initiation to bitter alienation, the entire experience
described entirely through words (a thrilling experience). Also
possible that Kiarostami himself never meant any rational
explanation, that the relationship between Miller and the woman are
meant to remain in a state of flux, evolving emotionally, if not
narratively.
As
for the question of copies and originals, I suppose I must admit my
ignorance and say: what's the problem? At one point in the film it's
said that even a painting as great as the Mona Lisa must have been
based on an original face. Certainly that face belonged to someone,
that someone is a human being, and humans are possibly the most
complex and unreproducible entity in the world, but the challenge is
in communicating the experience of meeting that human, that complex
and unreproducible being--that's where the art comes in. Is a fresh leg of
pork tastier than an air-dried ham? Is a man's experience of a
countryside picnic greater than Renoir's Partie de campagne
(Day in the Country, 1936)? In each case the experience--complete and
whole--is simplified and distilled, the essence mysteriously captured
and manipulated according to the artisan's skills and sensibility and, if he does the work right, evokes that experience with far greater eloquence and significance than the mere accumulation of details would imply.
Kiarostami must have been inspired by some real-life incident that
happened to him; is that experience, shapeless and incommunicable,
greater than this resulting film? I have no definite answers; I can
only ask.
First published in Businessworld, 1.12.12
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