"It's enigmatic and obvious, exasperating and beguiling, heavy-handed and understated, witty and poignant, all at once."
-- Alex Ramon, Boycotting Trends
What I like most about Abbas Kiarostami's "Certified Copy" is its slipperiness. The Tuscan textures are ravishing (it takes place over the course of an afternoon in and around the village of Lucignano -- or does it?), Juliette Binoche and William Shimell are easy on they eyes and ears (good thing, too, since the movie is practically one long conversation -- or is it?), but for me the most enjoyable thing about it is the way the story and characters keep subtly (and not-so-subtly) shifting, refusing to be pinned down. I was fearing one of those overly literalized Kiarostami "button" endings, but this time (as Michael Sicinski observes in his impressive, ambitious essay at MUBI), the thesis statement is placed at the front of the film and it gets slipperier from there:
"Certified Copy" operates almost in reverse of most thematically inclined works of art, which plunge us into a falsely desultory universe and gradually reveal their master interpretive passkey. Kiarostami's film presents a concept, fully formed and cogent, and allows the rest of the film to set to work on that concept, breaking it into Heisenbergian particles, then bringing it back into solid shape, and on and on.
It begins (after a brief apology for the guest speaker's tardiness) with a lecture by James Miller (played by operatic baritone Shimell), a British author who has just published an Italian translation of his book, "Certified Copy" -- a treatise questioning the value of authenticity in art. (He says he'd wanted to call it "Forget the Original, Just Get a Good Copy.") What does that have to do with the rest of the movie? Maybe not much. It depends on your interpretation. I have mine (and I'm not sure I can precisely answer my own question), but what's even more intriguing to me is that others who have seen the film and written about it don't necessarily agree on some of the fundamentals -- like whether Binoche's character has a name (some say it's "Elle," others say she's mysteriously nameless) or what her relationship is/was to James. [Turns out "Elle" is both a name and a pronoun in French.]
Many comparisons have been drawn -- mostly to Roberto Rossellini's "Viaggio in Italia (1954), Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura (1960), Wong Kar-wai's "In the Mood for Love" and Richard Linklater's romantic gabfests, "Before Sunrise" (1995) and "Before Sunset" (2004), but also to Alain Resnais' and Alain Robbe-Grillet's "Last Year at Marienbad and late Buñuel ("The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," "The Phantom of Liberty," "That Obscure Object of Desire")...
(Here you may want to stop reading so as not to prejudice your own experience of "Certified Copy," which is now playing in "selected theaters," as they say, and will be available on demand beginning March 23.)
All of the comparisons are apt in their way (more than one critic has noted that the movie -- Kiarostami's first made outside of Iran -- is his own "certified copy" of a mid-century European art film): Like Rossellini's film it recounts a decayed/decaying marriage (though just whose is up for debate); like Antonioni's, the characters' relationships metamorphose and the story contains intriguing elisions; like Wong's, it is a chronicle of an unlikely romance; like Linklater's, it consists mainly of continuous conversation between a man and a woman, ranging from the philosophical to the personal, in a picturesque European setting; like Resnais' and Robbe-Grillet's, it revolves around the mystery of how these people know each other; and like the Buñuel films it quietly resists any attempts on the viewer's part to read it literally or to supply plausible explanations for the characters' behavior.
Oh, you may think you've got it figured out every once in a while -- the movie will throw you an obvious bone now and again -- but... no. And, as the Coens put it, even if you could explain it, where would that get you? Matt Cornell articulated his -- and my -- sentiments beautifully in a comment on Sicinski's piece:
I'm not that much interested in the "puzzle" aspect of the movie, because I think Kiarostami's formal playfulness (and it IS playful) is employed to explore the uncanny-- to give greater emotional texture and intellectual depth that would otherwise be impossible in a literal-minded or linear film.
I overheard people discussing the movie as I left, and many seemed fixated on solving it logically. I blame movies like "The Matrix," "Inception" & "Enter the Void" for taking the virtual reality/dream film concept and then treating it with such narrative obviousness and expository literal-mindedness. In those films, you're only left fussing over the complex "rules," much like a video game. It becomes a game or a puzzle for the viewer. PK Dick's work has often been misused in this way...
I think my favorite scene (because it's one of the funniest) comes during an argument about a fountain sculpture in a village square. Elle (I'm going to call her that because, even though I don't remember her name from watching the movie, that's what she's called in the New York Times review, and it's easier to write than "Binoche's character") says she likes the sculpture. Not as a work of art; she just likes the subject, the way the woman rests her head on the man's shoulder. The funny thing is, we haven't seen anything above the male figure's genitals, and we never do get a very clear look at the fountain, except when it appears in the background (or a mirror reflection).
Elle solicits the opinion of an older couple, a pair of French tourists, and it's here, just before the scene with the film's most jarring shift, that the movie tips its hand a bit: the gentleman (old enough to be James's father), who offers him some romantic advice, suggesting he can undo the emotional damage of the afternoon with a simple gesture (putting his hand on her shoulder), is played by Jean-Claude Carriere, co-author with Buñuel of the films mentioned above. (And co-writer of "Birth," too.) "I don't know what happened between you... and I cannot know," he says. "And I do not care. It does not concern me. But all your problems could be erased with a simple gesture." Can a well-timed, well-judged gesture (even if it's premeditated) cancel out the consequences of a day (or, perhaps, years) of intellectual and emotional arguments? There's a question worth considering...
At this point in the movie (which I've seen only once), I was thinking of "That Obscure Object of Desire," in which Buñuel cast two actresses as a single character and switched them in and out at random. Although Elle had offered an explanation for the first bit of slipperiness -- a cafe proprietress had mistaken her and James for a married couple and she didn't bother to correct the error -- the role-playing (if that's what it is) has just begun.
Here's where the wrinkles get deeper. Sicinski writes that, having seen "Certified Copy" a second time -- "that is, repeated, viewed with experience" -- he has reached a conclusion: These two people aren't just inventing scenes from a marriage (like, say, George and Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?")...
... I must admit to being mystified by the frequency with which I've seen "Certified Copy" referred to as a "game," in which Binoche and Shimell are described as strangers who, for whatever reason, have decided to pretend to be a married couple. This is one way to avoid all the most complicated and maddening aspects of this film, and to take the theme of copy / original at its face-value worst. [...]
So, to make it absolutely clear: this is a film about a married couple, and although Kiarostami orchestrates the film in something pretty close to real time, we are not watching a series of linear events. To borrow from David Bordwell, the syuzhet of "Certified Copy" is not the same as its fabula. In other words, the plotline, the series of events depicted onscreen are not the temporally defined, single-trajectory story of "the marriage of the Millers." As Bordwell tells us, art films frequently pry plot and story, syuzhet and fabula apart, this being the very aesthetic "work" they perform on their topic of choice.
In the comments, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky says that he reads the movie quite differently:
Let the "Certified Copy" debate begin / continue: for me, they are most certainly strangers, and the film becomes more complex if they are perceived as such, and is merely a "Last Year at Marienbad"-style puzzlebox (and I write this as a Resnaisian, albeit one that tends to think of "Marienbad" as one of his weakest films) if they are in fact a real married couple.
(Ignatiy has more to say about the film in his review on "Ebert Presents At the Movies.")
So, I'll just chime in here to say that I think these are both good answers to the wrong question. Or, one that isn't worth answering definitively, because it offers only binary options, and the movie requires that you hold multiple possibilities in your head at the same time. What you see is what happens in the movie. There is no "reality" apart from what is there. (Mr. Scorsese, please: "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.") You don't look at "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and say: "Well, that dinner party is real, but when they're walking down the road it's a fantasy." You don't look at "That Obscure Object of Desire" and say, "The scenes with Carole Bouquet are the real ones, and the scenes with Ángela Molina are imaginary." Where would that get you? You would be denying the essential movieness of the experience.
Sicinski has his reasons, well-argued, for his point of view, but I think he's closer to the mark when he cites Bordwell and says that the events depicted in the movie just don't rigorously correspond to what we experience as viewers watching the movie. Look at James's entrance: Late for his own lecture, he enters from the rear of the room and is immediately stopped by a woman and a boy, for whom he stops to sign a copy of his book -- until the host asks people to hold off until afterwards. That woman is Elle and the boy is her son. How do we square that with the moment in the trattoria when James grills Elle (both of them adopting new, amped-up, soap-operatic acting styles) about the road accident she almost had when she dozed off at the wheel while their son was in the back seat? Well, we don't. How can we? Why should we? They are married and not married, strangers and intimates. What's unknown -- that is, what is deliberately left out of the movie -- is as important as what's known. Perhaps, like Billy Pilgrim, these characters have come unstuck in time, or have slipped into multiple alternate universes (Glenn Kenny said the movie "can be seen as the first great science-fiction film of the year").
What matters is not who is the original and who is the copy, but how the various thematic elements keep bouncing off one another. The scene in the square that I mentioned above is teeming with romantic possibilities and alternate scenarios we might follow: in addition to the unseen statue of the man with the woman's head resting on his shoulder, there's a boy and a girl (he has his arm, awkwardly, around her) sitting on the left of the fountain; members of a wedding party are in the background, getting photos taken; and, later, the older French couple appear -- but only on the soundtrack at first (while we see Elle's reflections in two mirrors), as the man is saying: "You know that we talk about it together, and you also know it was wrong. You're wrong!" And it turns out he's speaking not to his wife, as we are first led to believe, but to a party unknown on his mobile phone. The fight in the trattoria leads to a church and a very elderly couple, who guide us back to the steps of a pensione that, we're told, has particular emotional significance for these two -- though James does not remember it. (Echoes of the opening of Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" -- her presence doesn't quite register with him.)
I like the way GK describes the film here:
As it happens, though, "Certified Copy" isn't really about what its characters are discussing; it's about the changes enacted by the characters as the discussion continues, the emotional twists and turns that become more than emotional twists and turns. They end up actual transformations of the "reality" of the film itself.
And Brazilian critic Pablo Villaça offers a splendid analysis/appreciation on Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents page:
Therefore, there is a third -- and, I believe, more logical -- possibility: the characters take on a different dynamic because they in fact become different individuals whose lives combine elements of both realities. And this alteration happens simply because it's fundamental for the discussion Kiarostami proposes: that our perception about the characters (or about art in a general way) isn't or shouldn't be affected by the confirmation of its unreality. The ideas presented by the movie and its characters, as well as their personal issues, are dramatically efficient and relevant even though they are naturally false -- and they are always false, since we are, after all, talking about a fiction, independently of the couple's version presented by the movie.
However, in order to make this argument work, it was mandatory that the audience was caught by surprise by the changes the characters experience -- and that's where the director demonstrates his intelligence by establishing a consistent logic during the first hour of projection just to pull the rug under the public right after. In order to do that, Kiarostami conceives a narrative grounded on naturalism in its tiny details, from the writer's embarrassed pauses when his jokes don't make the audience laugh to the way Binoche hits her purse on his face when she removes it from the car seat so he can sit.
Likewise, the director invests in long scenes that, comprised from extensive and static shots, give a realistic rhythm to the conversations, which also reveal fluidity thanks to the minimalistic but precise performances of the main couple: observe, for example, how Binoche completes the joke Shimell was telling in order to prove a point or the way she interrupts a sentence to complain about a pedestrian who crossed the street in front of her car and you will certainly confirm the director's strategy and his actor's -- especially by contrasting these moments with others that happen during the second half of the movie, when the performances become more intense and gimmicky, as we can observe when a lone tear is seen streaming down Binoche's face or when Shimell treats a waiter with an aggressive arrogance.
(Not only is that last paragraph lovely -- it's one sentence! A long, fluid take.)
"Oh, for heaven's sake, that's an absurd interpretation. Look, it's just not reasonable to expect us to feel the same way that that married couple do -- not after 15 years. Things have changed -- of course things have changed! -- but not as ridiculously as you make out. Look, love's still there -- it just shows itself in different ways. And you've got to come to terms with that. Why can't you understand it? I really don't like having to explain the obvious to you."
I chuckled at this speech James gives (in a medium close-up, facing the camera, with a wedding party out the window behind him) because it seemed to me that perhaps Kiarostami was addressing us, the audience, through the character. Maybe this is the movie's "thesis statement" and not James's opening speech (that Elle and her son don't stick around for). "The obvious" is that what we're seeing is what we're seeing.
I don't blame anybody for feeling that "Certified Copy" is irritating. It is. These characters become quite irritating as the movie goes on (I think Elle turns into a needy and emotionally solipsistic harridan, while Stephen Holden in the NYT writes: "Despite its modernist sensibility, there is little reason to be intimidated, unless you find the character of James abhorrent"). Roger Ebert, although he rates the film highly, describes it as "too clever by half, creating full-bodied characters but inserting them into a story that is thin soup." I can't really argue with that; I just found myself more intrigued than annoyed.
Perhaps a cynic (like me) might suggest that the whole original/copy text/subtext could apply to marriage and spouses in general. ("Unhappy marriages are all alike...") After all, most people don't get married because they've found they're romantic ideal; they get married because they feel it's time to get married and this was who they were with at the time they felt that way. (Or, in some cultures, their parents made the decision for them.) Is that what "Certified Copy" is implying, too? That it doesn't matter if Elle and James are married because, even if they're strangers, they might as well be married, given that they've imagined a past (future?) together? (By the way, the French title, "Copie Conforme," is more resonant. "Certified" has bureaucratic overtones -- as in a marriage license? -- but "Conforme" [according to Google Translate!] has other meanings that might better fit the movie: true, standard, congruent, faithful.)
It's possible that I'm giving "Certified Copy" the benefit of the doubt because doubt is where my interest lies. (I am passionate about Buñuel, "Birth" and "A Serious Man," too.) Certainty is the enemy of art, and "Certified Copy" is nothing if not an old-fashioned "art film."
35 Comments
This is a fantastic essay to what is probably my favorite film of the year. I'm curious about what you mean by the "button" ending that you find overly literalized. I find the endings to Kiarostami's movies to be quite exquisite. *Kiarostami spoilers!!!* For instance, THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES presents, in a beautifully distanced long take, our protagonist making his way to the woman he plans to marry. The camera observes from afar, Kiarostami allowing the Iranian landscape to dictate what we hear.(though let's be honest, his sound designs are as finely tweaked as Bahrani's). We never hear her response but we see the way the protagonist responds physically as he runs back down the path before the beautiful recurring musical motif kicks in at the end.
Or how about the ending to THE WIND WILL CARRY US, the human(or not human) bone cast into the stream by the central character,Kiarostami's camera capturing the downstream unpredictability of the bone's movements which brings up the themes of chance and improvisation and documentary recording that I find so quintessential to many of Kiarostami's films. But maybe he is tricking us us in some way and the camera movements are not as epistemological as we initially though for the final camera movement is mirror opposite movement of the first camera pan and first image of the film which captures a group of news researchers moving up the Iranian hillsides in their car. Both of these endings, to me, are not overly literalized "button" endings but extremely tender, expansive moments which may or may not(this binary opposition is huge for Kiarostami I think) raise the significance of what we saw before it.
Is your comment a criticism of his work or what? If you get a chance, perhaps you should expand on what you do not like about his endings. You are, understandably considering this piece is not on the endings to his other movies), vague within the essay concerning what that comment actually means.
Love yah, Jim!
I thought the same thing about Jim's evasive wording concerning "button" endings, in an otherwise great piece. As far as I'm concerned, Kiarostami has crafted (in the closing run through the Olive Trees, in Wind Will Carry Us's enigmatic bone-into-river toss, in Close-Up's secondhand Mahkmalbaf sighting and others) some of the most profound endings in cinema history, which linger and continue to reward because of the open-ended nature of their summations. Kiarostami isn't fool enough to intimate that a film's final sequence of images could ever approximate the totality of life, and so allows his audience to read into his deceptively simple endings whatever humanism he's crafted for us to be inspired by.
There's a lot of Kiarostami I still haven't seen, but I was thinking specifically about "A Taste of Cherry" and "The Wind Will Carry Us" -- both films I think are beautiful and enigmatic up until the final images. I'm one of those who feels postmodern/reflexive video coda of "Cherry" is almost as bad as running a blooper reel at the end of "Ordet." (Kiarostami has said he included it because he didn't want to leave the main character alone at the end; whatever his reasons, I felt it detracted from the spell the film had cast up until then.) By the time Louis Armstrong's recording of "St. James Infirmary" kicks in, the whole thing feels like a bad joke, especially if you recall the (unheard) lyrics: "I went down to St. James Infirmary / Saw my baby there / Set down on a long white table / So sweet, so cold, so fair." As for "Wind," the bone in the muddy water felt to me (the one time I've seen the movie) like an overstatement. A little too neat. I very much admire both films, and I think they would be even more open and elliptical without those endings (which are very much crafted to be "endings"). I know many who feel this way, and many who don't. So, in that sense, I guess the endings work -- they divide opinion and get people talking about them.
The ending of TASTE OF CHERRY is problematic for me as well, Jim. But concerning THE WIND WILL CARRY US, I think Kiarostami does something that is very Mizoguchian in terms of the almost structuralist sense of unity and completeness which comes with it, at least on the surface of things. SANSHO THE BAILIFF'S ending is perhaps the most unifying end I've ever seen. Kiarostami is adding the element of documentary in his own unique way with the ending to THE WIND WILL CARRY US. It praises the way nature and the past create moments of pattern and synchronicity with art.
Surprised that almost nobody is mentioning Rivette in these discussions. The interest in role-playing and shifting identities always makes me think of films like CELINE AND JUILE GO BOATING, GANG OF FOUR, OUT 1 and THE STORY OF MARIE AND JULIEN.
Another exhaustively thorough article from JE. I thought no one would top the Mubi.com piece you mention, but you've definitely added another layer.
There is something outside the frame and outside the story--intention, subtext, backstory, imagination, an iceberg of unspoken ideas that gave birth to the finished film--and the text or the frame of the finished film is all we have to go by. But this is not to say that the unspoken intentions don't matter or were never there or should not even be groped towards.
I'm definitely in the "they're married" school and don't think the question is irrelevant. The nature and status of their relationship couldn't matter more and to say that this question is important or that there's something of an answer to it in no way reduces the meaning or complexity of the film itself.
Watch closely how the kid and Binoche talk at the cafe in the beginning or consider the story of Shimmel's not shaving for their wedding. Unless the film is a fully Bunuelian surreality--which seems about as far from Kiarostami's aesthetics and intentions as you can get--then there's one way in which they could both independently recount precisely the same story of his not shaving for their wedding day--it must be because in a very real sense at some time in the past this actually happened to them.
Nothing about an evidence-based answer to this particular question reduces the film to a mere puzzle or in any way compromises its multi-layered complexity and beauty. And to maintain that it would strikes me as just as silly as believing that answering such a question somehow "solves" the film.
"Celine and Julie" is a terrific comparison. I don't mean to imply that, as you say, "the unspoken intentions don't matter or were never there or should not even be groped towards." That's why they're unspoken, left outside the frame and outside the story, so that they can be imagined but not pinned down. I guess I'd look at it this way: If they are/were married, then when? Was it 15 years from the night before this afternoon? Or some other time in the past/present/future? And who are "they"? Are they always the same people? Are there perhaps multiple marriages being examined/imagined through these characters? (I like Pablo Villaca's suggestion of a "third possibility" -- that "the characters take on a different dynamic because they in fact become different individuals whose lives combine elements of both realities.")
When I was watching the movie I thought maybe Binoche's character had been married to someone like James, or was familiar with his type, and his "I only shave every other day" line was meant to be ironic. Why would he need to tell her that, if they were married? Either way, that was such a nice moment.
I think it's spelled "Juliette Binoche."
That's all I can comment on for now, because I don't want to finish reading your post until I've seen the movie.
The Pablo Villaca quote is quite beautiful. A part of what I regard so highly in all of Kiarostami's work and this film in particular is this movement toward a "third possibility" that neither embraces nor rejects the major tactics, techniques and philosophies of modernism or post-modernism.
As long as it's not taken so literally, I fully agree with Villaca. And, in fact, I'd go a bit further and say that most of us involved in long-term relationships will at many points "take on a different dynamic because we become different individuals whose lives combine elements of multiple realities."
Without any exaggeration that's been my personal experience of my own marriage and my observation about many other long-term pairings.
Apparent from any considerations based on evidential details from the film, I can't buy Shimmel's character sticking around past the statue scene--let alone expressing such raw emotions and vulnerability--unless he's having (or at least had) a long-term relationship with the Binoche character. Quite simply, this is the way married folks fight. About stupid little things and everything all at once and in fits and starts with genuine warmth and togetherness and normalcy and love and the spontaneous recounting of random moments from their shared history--mixed with occasional fronting for other people in public.
With the exceptions of Bergman and Cassavetes, I'd be hard pressed to find a couple fighting with such truth and accuracy anywhere else in the history of cinema.
There is a very important part of the movie that it hasn't been addressed so far that goes along well with Pablo Villaca's take on the it: the conversation between mother and son early in the movie. Since he refers to James as a stranger, I don't see how they are a married couple in "reality"' and, most importantly, why does that even matter.
If anything, this scene suggests that during the rest of the film we are observing a "Conformed Copy" of a marriage, and Kiarostami invites us to tell the difference.
I don't speak French, but the subtitles on the Artificial Eye disc I've reviewed never translated any description of James by the boy in this scene as a stranger.
The key beat of that particular scene seems to me to be a question that remains unanswered, where the son asks Binoche: "Why didn't you want him [James, the writer] to sign [my copy of his book] with my surname? My name is Julien...." And he never says what his surname is. Binoche gets so worked up about this that she leaves the cafe. I wager that the surname issue matters for a couple of possible reasons: either it's the same as James' or different when it shouldn't be (James is perhaps his biological father).
There's another possibility entirely that I haven't heard anyone else considering and it's simply this: that the playfulness about roles, identities and romantic games isn't limited only to the two main characters, but in this case extends to the boy who himself is playing along in this scene with his mom and dad's anniversary dating game. This could also help explain why the boy is so amused in this scene, a little more than he might be if he were only teasing her about a crush on a stranger.
The boy teases her about her fascination with him, even though she says she doesn't particularly like his book. It's... ambiguous!
"There's another possibility entirely that I haven't heard anyone else considering and it's simply this: that the playfulness about roles, identities and romantic games isn't limited only to the two main characters, but in this case extends to the boy who himself is playing along in this scene with his mom and dad's anniversary dating game."
Could we extend this to every single character in the movie? I mean, where does the identity game end? Are the elder couple or the waitress -or the just married for that matter- "in" it (not necessarily "aware") in very same way the main characters are? After all, Elle chooses what restaurant to go to (some to which they've been before?) and who to talk to by the stattue.
One other thing.
I believe the narration tells us everything it knows (it does not intentionally keep anything to itself for the sake of a mystery to be solved) during the entire movie except for one blatant moment in which sound is omitted: the old waitress whispers something to Elle and we can't hear it.
I have no clue to why Kiarostami made such choice.
I don't recall her being given a name in my (single) viewing of the film and I think of "Elle" not as a name but as a pronoun: French for "she" or "her." My hazy memory recalls her listed as "Elle" in the credits, which would be the NYT's source.
I agree that there is a compulsion to "solve" the mystery of the film, which the film designs in a way that can't be literally explained. That may be a very cagey ploy in Kiarostami's part because the mind does try to make sense of things. I think that's why some of David Lynch's later films are so compelling and memorable. Our minds work overtime trying to connect pieces together that, by design, make no literal sense. It almost forces us to find other meanings. But I think it also keeps our minds working over the pieces that don't work together, trying to "understand" it on a literal, logical level just so it can come to some closure. By denying easy closure, I think it invites us, both consciously and subconsciously, to keep coming back to it.
See, that's how much French I know. Yes, "Elle" is a name AND a pronoun. Very clever. I remember a quote from Kiarostami in which he said he liked to leave blank spaces in his films -- but that he thought it was impossible to make cinema without storytelling. As I like to say (paraphrasing Michael Shermer, I think), we are "pattern-seeking animals," so maybe that's what AK was referring to, as well. Our natural inclination is to string together images into some kind of story. Of the Kiarostami movies I've seen, I think "Certified Copy" is one of the most successful because it leaves the "story" wide open...
Not much to add to the discussion here. Just wanted to say that this is an exquisite piece, Jim, and I learned a great deal from it. Thank you!
Others, like Ignatiy V. and Ekkehard Knoerer, have gently taken me to task over at MUBI for those assertions in my own piece that seem too forceful or definitive, that veer strongly toward one reading over another. I'll just say this. As I joked in the comments there, I, like "James Miller," "had to close the book" at some point, and could not track my way through all possibilities. And naturally I articulated the ones that resonated most with me.
But also, my piece was sort of a conscious experiment with "closure." I tend to come down on the side of radical undecideability very often in my readings of things (my academic "damage") and I was interested in trying to err on the side of certainty, just for a change. A thought experiment: "Be more like Mike D'Angelo."
Thanks again, Jim.
Thank you! This addresses a fundamental theme in popular art-film interpretation that I take issue with. I was actually discussing this specifically, before I read your essay, when i came across the either/or debate of Ignatiy Vishnevetsky & Christy Lemire on At the Movies. While Kiarostami's film presents a more obvious example of this synopsizing or reducing of a narrative to it's most easily understandable terms, based in reality & not art, I think this is a more widespread phenomenon. I often refer to it as the "synopsis sickness" and it's one of the main reasons I get dizzy & flustered while reading art-film reviews. I even take issue with Vishnevetsky's description of Last Year at Marienbad as a "puzzle-box". Though that idea is more entrenched, by virtue of time & popular criticism, it is exactly the same misinterpretation which this essay refers to. As an aside, while "Heisenbergian particles" or "sci-fi" may be a somewhat apt & lovely metaphor for the initiated, it's a terribly misleading description to use in an argument. It only begs more literal-minded speculation that is silly and non-existent. Anyway, great essay, Jim!
If anyone hasn't seen the "Close-Up", you should see it right away. I think it's Kiarostami's masterpiece and it shows that the idea of copy and original was one of his concerns from his early works.
It was released by Criterion Collection recently.
I don't know if it's that you're cynical... unless you're "romantically cynical."
Because isn't Roger's reaction the truly cynical response? (It was amusing but it doesn't really tell us anything.) Whereas yours thinks it actually does add up to something--just not in any instinctually way...
"the characters take on a different dynamic because they in fact become different individuals"
Do they, though?
He is cold and resigned for the most part until he loses his patience in the restaurant near the end. She is eternally dissatisfied with him, finding him withholding, and she becomes more emotionally unstable as the movie goes on. Both progressions felt rather smooth to me. I don't understand treating James' blow-up in the restaurant as some radical departure of character - what, does this guy never get angry? And the conversation itself is a progression from analogous small talk to (possibly still analogous) soul-bearing, so of course it's going to rise in intensity and tone.
The only ambiguities have to do with the nature of the characters' involvement with one another and not the character(istic)s themselves. The movie is at least partially about the differences between the two personalities, so I think any intentional shifts in their continuity would be damaging (and I don't think there are any).
I agree with basically everything you say, except I think - to transplant part of your analysis of A Serious Man - I think the movie can be seen as both a movie about a married couple evaluating their relationship through a game and as a movie about a pair of strangers engaging in a game evaluating a married couple, one that perhaps incorporates relationships they've had in the past; and I think both movies play out in real time with no interdimensional shifts necessary.
Two things:
-The fountain scene was my favourite as well, I laughed out loud at the way the old lady's description of the statue changed in the presence of an art historian
-I'm surprised you find her more solipsistic than him. He takes everything she says and twists it into some thesis statement reaffirming everything he already believes (or says he believes, or pretends to believe).
I just got back from this film. At the risk of sounding like a moron whose seen few art films and too many Hollywood sci-fi stuff, could there be a supernatural reading of the mystery? I understand its Modernist form, but for those who want answers--and who are plebians that way--how about this: Elle is dead and everything we see is in some kind of hell or purgatory. James becomes a copy of her husband because she is spending eternity trying to make him forgive her. Forgive her for what? The car accident that killed their son.
In the cafe when he mentions how the idea for his book came from watching a woman and her son, I took it as Elle and her boy. She starts crying. I thought maybe she had another boy she lost, the one James saw with his mother. Perhaps she had twins and one died. Then when the the two take on the roles of the married couple, they see newlyweds, an older couple, and an elderly couple, all copies of the marriage. Could that be the arc of the marriage Elle wanted to have, but never got to, becuase her son died? That's why the husband is cold and absent, because he never stopped blaming her for it. Perhaps she killed herself and is now recreating her husband and son, but each time failing to connect with him (as he doesn't remember their anniversary and is still cold and distant.) Like Sisyphus, she is condemmed to want her husband's forgiveness and love, but because of what she did, will never get it. This could be what happens.
Or not. Again I've seen too many trick ending movies. Not knowing the director's work, and not familiar with European art cinema, the first thing I thought of upon exiting was that this was Before Sunrise as a Twilight Zone episode. The church bells at the end seemed to me bells tolling for the dead Elle and her lost happiness.
To add a little bit to what I said above, I think insisting that the characters aren't aware of some level of game-playing is ignoring a possible interpretation of their motives and of the last shot. James gets to put his theory (of self-actualization through fraud, to paraphrase his opening speech as best as I can) into practice. Regardless of what is pretend and what isn't, the question that I THINK is raised in the last scene in the hotel is: have these characters stumbled into some significant connection through their game, or are they going to remain disconnected?
I don't intend to answer, but I think James knows how he feels, looking at himself in the mirror in that last shot (which sort of calls back the first, in a way, doesn't it? The movie opens with an empty space eventually taken up by Shimmel, and closes with Shimmel being replaced by an empty space).
Sorry, Sisyphus didn't pine for romantic love. I meant he was punished by having to do the same thing over and over again. Elle could be punishing herself--if this is her new own made up reality--by trying to save a broken marriage, again and again, and not succeeding. The kid could be a certified copy too--the thing with the surname could mean he's not her son, just a boy she borrowed to serve as her son. In this reality she can actually protect him through admonitions over the phone. She might have seen James book before she died and his argument took hold of her and so she took him in this eternity as her husband. The movie poster had a critical blurb mentioning eternal recurrence, which is Nietzsche's idea of life repeating itself exactly, so that one goes through all the mistakes and regrets one made. The anwser then is to lead the best kind of life the first time. So that made me think of the this far-fetched and unsupported little theory. That and Lost.
It doesn't really matter though what the actual story is. What is important is what we see: a whole relationship captured in an afternoon. Like if Blue Valentine was an Aaron Sorkin walking and talking scene.
I think there becomes a problem when people start saying we shouldn't try to solve their relationship. If we weren't then we'd wouldn't be holding all these options in our heads. We are designed to solve problems and when you show us two things that are incongruent we naturally try to reconcile it in our heads. This is how we are built.
What is clear is that they are not strangers. For me the ambiguity started with, who goes on a drive with someone like that without any discussion? There are some previous hints, but those are only notable in hindsight. Then Miller knows the details of Elle's conversation he missed at the cafe. After she begs the question of what their previous relationship could have been, but as much as he likes her (all doe-eyed at the cafe) he can't totally succumb to this idea.
What isn't being discussed is the continued analysis of Miller's thesis. Maybe this intellectual analysis lacks the emotional fireworks of the last act or the omnipresence of interchangeable copies of the couples, but it is still there. It doesn't matter whether each of these people is same as the original, but what matters is the partner's reaction to them. It is the same as the statue, where Miller shows his hypocracy because of his reticence to fully enter the game.
I walked out on this movie after giving it one hour and fifteen minutes to interest me. Although Juliette Binoche is a treasure to watch, nearly continuous close ups of Shimell's unshaven face were annoying. People over 40 need to shave. I noticed that every single review I've read -- about five, so far -- has failed to identify what the movie is about. That's why I walked out. The movie has no dramatic tension, no plot, no rising and falling action. It is not a story or even a character study. It is simply a director's self-indulgence of his own narrow vision, which he has failed to adequately convey to his audience. A work of art that cannot communicate with its audience -- no matter what it displays -- is more than simply a failure, it is a bore.
You pose an interesting challenge: How to summarize what the movie is "about." Of course, some filmmakers would say that if they could do that, they wouldn't need to make the movie, but let me try: "Certified Copy" is about the history of a marriage -- or marriages -- in the form of conversations between a man and a woman (who may or may not be/have been married themselves) over the course of an afternoon in Tuscany. That's one way of describing it. There are many others...
It's certainly a character study.
Great piece, Jim, on a great film that I'm still wrestling with.
I see the film (at least in part) as a horror film about marriage. If David Lynch had made "Revolutionary Road" or "Blue Valentine" it might have looked a little like this. There's something about James' expression in the cafe--as he watches the tear roll down the Woman's cheek in the middle of his story about Florence--that's utterly chilling and devastating. It's as though he's not only suddenly remembering something painful and overwhelming (a romantic history he has forgotten?) but it's like *hearing* the film's reality silently fracturing, like he's briefly privy to the movie's surrealistic character. It reminds me of Nikki/Susan sudden awareness of the movie cameras in the darkness, filming her turgid dialogue with Devon/Billy. (Although she is briefly and initially amused, "This sounds like dialog from our film!") The look of horror on her face is stunning, and Shimell conveys something similar here.
I read a review of the film suggesting that Elle was the mistress of James. If so, she was never married to James and obviously wanted more of a relationship. The surname of her son Julien is not defined, so the boy may be James' son, or not. Perhaps Elle has fantasized a marriage which she wished she had to James. Thus, the relationship between James and Elle is at least in her mind certified copy of a real marriage with the added baggage of the insecurities of a mistress with Julien possibly being illegitimate or not. Thus James description of a woman (maybe Elle) walking down the street in Firenze with her son (maybe Julien) dallying along far behind seems to be a true observation which clearly is inferred as to why Elle was so distressed by the description. The complaint that James was snoring as he slept on the night of their anniversary seemed to be a fact, not a fantasy. Did Julien know James? That is not clear. Did James know that he was the father of Julien. OR was the relationship between the three just a cerified copy of an authentic relationship?
I didn't see the movie as that maddeningly complex at all. If anything I saw two people, a man late to his own lecture, who now has to confront the wife he intends to leave. They pretend to be first time lovers, the way couples sometimes act before the lovers flame goes out, they pretend everything is all right and as if all their problems had gone away, and when they arrive at the trattoria they're back to reality: where they are a married couple and they have to confront a broken marriage.
As a guy who's gone through his share of romantic rodeos I know I've played surreal role playing games that seem to make little to no sense with another lover. I think the game of pretend is played at the beginning in this film and reality gradually is revealed at the end. Making that final scene where James is alone in the bathroom all the more poignant. The game is over, in the morning he leaves on his train, and this is the end.
I agree that it is an old fashion art film, which means that much is open to interpertation. However there are always clues. To the question of does he stay or does he go - how many chimes are they at the end of the picture?
I finally saw this fine film this afternoon. Speaking of clues -- but clues to what -- in the last shot, in the bathroom, James suddenly appears clean shaven. Why?
(I haven't seen this mentioned in any of the commentary about the movie so far.) I was shocked when I noticed the change in his grooming -- but it makes sense because the issue of James/the husband only shaving every other day keeps coming up.
I just picked up Baudrillard's Simulacra & Simulation and within 2 pages I was back to poring over this movie in my mind:
"It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real...a hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences."
I loved the way the characters maneuvered back and forth between French & English ("refusing to be pinned down", indeed!). I'd have to watch it again to see if there's some logic/reason for speaking one or the other, but I thought it was fascinating while watching it.
An interesting moment for me was when James gets up pissed off and walks out of the restaurant (where he has the argument with Elle of the quote that you posted about being married 15 years), Elle is just sitting there and looks out the window and smiles and waves... but for a moment I forgot that the people were outside and it seemed like a breaking the fourth wall bit ala Funny Games (only much nicer and funnier).
That, to me, is what the movie is about. That wink to the audience before going on with the "world" that is in the movie. It is about perception of art- hence the conversation about it in the car ride ala Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol- and that's what makes the film exciting is perception.
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