Certified Copy

Certified Copy – Grave and beautiful, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2011) seems an incursion into territory typically associated with Ingmar Bergman. A couple, apparently married for fifteen years, bicker as they tour a beautiful Tuscan village. Their quarrel is protracted, painful, and obviously the result of love impacted into some kind of psychic abscess. The woman played by Juliette Binoche accuses her husband of having abandoned the family – presumably for his work (he is the author of a book Certified Copy translated into Italian as Copia Conforma, a scholarly treatise on copies and their originals). The husband (William Schimell) rejects his wife’s pleas for more attention and turns aside her sexual invitations. The two of them wander about an absurdly picturesque village where, it seems, that everyone is getting married. In the end, they enter a small hotel – the place where they spent their wedding night fifteen years earlier. The quarrel simply becomes more intense and the man says that he has to be at the train station by 9:00 pm. The bells of a nearby church ring and it is 8:00. His wife sprawled seductively on the bed in the next room, the husband glares sadly at his image “copied” or reflected in the bathroom mirror. The marital squabbling has a shabby, brutal immediacy. Most married couples, I suppose, will recognize themselves in, at least, some of the bickering and recriminations aired between the husband and wife. Furthermore, the entire debate, continuously devolving into cruel insults, seems unnecessary and obscurely motivated – only these two people can understand why they seem to detest one another so thoroughly, and, also, why neither will leave nor disengage from the duel. A lot of this is familiar Bergman material – Scenes from a Marriage, Sarabande, and Shame come to mind immediately. The husband and wife fight as if the fate of God and history rests on the outcome of their quarrel. Furthermore, typical of much marital conflict, the moment one combatant relents and shows weakness or desire, the other takes swift and merciless advantage. Each makes gestures toward ending the quarrel, but everything is mistimed and misunderstood. Ultimately, one of them says: “If we were a little more tolerant of each other’s weaknesses, we wouldn’t be so much alone.” Curiously, the raw material of the damaged marriage is wrapped in an enigmatic, Borgesian frame. Initially, the couple act as if they don’t know one another and their first encounter seems to be an illicit tryst. They act as if they are meeting as complete strangers and the film’s narrative, at first, doesn’t disclose the fact that they are married – and have been married for fifteen years (it’s the morning after the husband forgot his anniversary). This narrative strategy has dispiriting consequence – we wonder why are these two attractive and accomplished people being so mean to one another in such a lovely place. When we learn that they are married, then, the cause of their rancor seems explicable – not a good commentary on the institution of marriage. The concept of the “certified copy,” the subject of the husband’s scholarly tome, is discussed at some length, made the subject of some philosophical conversation, but never exactly gels. It is the husband’s assertion that a copy is just as good as the real thing – perhaps, even better. This seems to enrage his wife who advocates authenticity. But exactly why the couple pretend not to know one another in the opening half hour of the film is never explained. The trailer proposes this misdirection as some kind of seductive game – but this seems wrong to me on the evidence of the film itself. (The trailer makes the movie look like a jolly romantic comedy set in pretty Tuscany – a total misrepresentation of the film.) I will suggest a reason for the “copy” theme – the film is clearly a copy of Roberto Rosselini’s Voyage in Italy. Juliette Binoche acts the role that Ingrid Bergman played in Rosselini’s great film; the English husband is very similar to the character played by George Saunders. Many of the sequences in the film mirror episodes in Voyage in Italy. Accordingly, it seems to me that the Conforma copia theme represents some kind of anxiety about how closely the film tracks certain aspects of Rosselini’s picture. In any event, the metaphysical enigmas wrapped around the dueling couple are interesting, but don’t add a lot to the picture. In a very real sense, much of the film is about Juliette Binoche’s breasts – this is made explicit when she abandons her brassiere in a deserted church. The viewer has the real urge to punch the husband’s character in the nose: how can anyone be so obtuse? Like Liv Ullman in Scenes from a Marriage, Binoche is almost supernaturally beautiful in some scenes.