Covering Media

William Shimell as "James Miller" and Juliette Binoche as "She" in CERTIFIED COPY directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Photo Credit: Laurent Thurin Nal. An IFC Films release.

Certified Copy (2010/2011)

Also Known As: Copie Conforme

Opened: 03/11/2011 Limited

Trailer: Click for trailer

Websites: Home

Genre: Foreign Drama (French and Italian w/English subtitles)

Rated: Unrated

Synopsis

This is the story of a meeting between one man and one woman, in a small Italian village in Southern Tuscany. The man is a British author who has just finished giving a lecture at a conference. The woman, from France, owns an art gallery. This is a common story that could happen to anyone, anywhere.

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami and stars Juliette Binoche and William Shimell with Jean-Claude Carriere, Agathe Natanson, Gianna Giachetti, Adrian Moore, Angelo Barbagallo, Andrea Laurenzi, Filippo Troiano and Manuela Balsimelli.

The screenwriter was Abbas Kiarostami. The movie was produced by Marin Karmitz, Nathanael Karmitz, Charles Gillibert, Angelo Barbagallo and Gaetano Daniele.

Writer's Statement

How can one tell yet another story about love in Tuscany? CERTIFIED COPY: by playing around with the cliches. With the usual settings, the small love-nest hotels, the cups of coffee cooling as the lovers drink each other in, the narrow streets where they go astray, hurt themselves, find themselves, their heels clattering on the cobblestones: "If I'd known we'd be coming here, I would have worn other shoes," says the woman played by Juliette Binoche.

Other paths following in the same footsteps: in a little street, the film takes a new turn. Words take on a disconcerting twist, a detour into the unfamiliar, the uncanny. This man and this woman who have--it seems--only just met are playing at being a couple. They pretend so well, in fact, that they seem to become one, or to have already been one for fifteen years. They have already come here. They have already played this scene. As have all couples who come to make love in Tuscany, to invent their own love story, to play in their own film. "I have a train to catch at nine o'clock." The man is, according to the woman, "always absent." The first thing the camera films is an empty chair: all we see is a book, Certified Copy. We await the author. The credits scroll over a long shot of this absence and its only legacy, the work.

A self-portrait of Kiarostami? "He can't claim he's stuck in traffic, he's staying in an apartment upstairs," explains the translator, the first double of the author. Who finally arrives. And who is pleased by the recognition accorded him here, in Tuscany. His book hasn't enjoyed even the faintest echo of acclaim in his own country. Recognition and echo: the film is off and running, the copy is rolling. Reflections, rearview mirrors, windows and glasses, everything shimmers. And that assessment the woman will keep seeking, so that others will tell her who she is, whom she loves.

The author is English, played by William Shimell, a well-known opera singer, a baritone. The film is also about voices. Full shot of the audience at a lecture, showing their faces, their reactions. The sonorous voice drones on; sitting between her son and the translator, the woman fidgets. Then grows annoyed. It's annoying, to be seduced.

The opposite is true, but not completely symmetrical: the eternal misunderstanding between men and women. Around the older couple swirl young brides and grooms, suits and white dresses. The copies they make, the model ancestral couples, the rehearsals and repetitions from parents to children: three generations keep intersecting, discreetly, in the film. A dragonfly pendant dances between the woman's breasts: a mayfly. A lifetime of love in a single day: the film disrupts the great classic pattern, but without looping through deep shifts in time--we're not in Marienbad, here. Without any psychological nostalgia, either. The love affair of a single day that opens onto life: this is a film neither of phantoms nor regrets, and where all illusions are not lost.

The focus of the camera seems to be the mayfly, between her breasts. The weather is warm; the shadow there gleams softly. The woman takes her shoes off first. There is no end to her modesty and sensuality.

Binoche is an actress, who has always had a body, blunt fingertips, full breasts. Here she embodies a whole woman, who sweats, wears earrings that leave marks, lipstick that smears. "I made myself beautiful for you, and you're not looking at me?" He doesn't remember their wedding anniversary. Time-honored complaints, in every language.

Except that we hear the words as if for the first time, thanks to the actors, their voices, their bodies, carried along by the way in which the story is "out of synch". . . . Words spoken to seduce? To find each other, or to leave each other? She takes off her bra underneath her dress, in that maneuver so soon mastered by women who wear one. She wants to show him the mark where it was bothering her, hurting her. Is she the wife of fifteen years, languidly at home in the physical routine of flesh and fluids?

Is she the bold seductress of barely a moment's acquaintance, who wants a man and has the courage to show that she does? And he, does he want her? Does he know her? As of an hour ago, a whole lifetime ago, what does he know about her? And about art, and love, and his desire, and what he must make of his life, this evening at nine, and every evening?

--Marie Darrieussecq