CERTIFIED COPY
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. With Juliette Binoche, William Shimell, Jean- Claude Carrière.
The Hot Press Newsdesk, 06 Sep 2010
A riff on Harold Pinter’s The Lovers, this doodle from Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami features Juliette Binoche and Willian Scimell as a newly introduced couple who pretend to be married. A lesser Before Sunrise for older people, the director zooms in on the fort-das of the central relationship – the arguments, the tension and various disappointments – to create a fairly diverting exercise.
Binoche, an art gallery owner, takes an English writer she admires (William Shimell, an opera singer who has never appeared on film before) on a driving tour of Tuscany. When a coffee shop owner mistakes them for a married couple, they do nothing to correct him and, in a magic realist turn, they adopt the roles of a husband and wife on the verge of their 15th anniversary.
The director’s Big Idea is that the copy is just as valid and believable as the original an idea that determines much of their chatter and which forms the basis of the author’s most recent publication.
The film was well received at Cannes where Binoche landed the Best Actress gong ahead of a far more deserving performance by Leslie Manville in Another Year, the new Mike Leigh film. It’s difficult to understand why. Much like Certified Copy’s central thesis, this slight tangent feels like it is going through the motions without ever convincing us that it’s a real movie.
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