Certified Copy (2010)

Many films benefit from allowing a level of ambiguity, allowing inexplicable lacunae or resisting trying to add things up into a neat interpretation. Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is an example. For me, it's impossible to fit this film into a neat narrative - 'this is what was going on' - and if one would venture into such an attempt at explanation, I think one would impoverish what was good in Certified copy, a movie which is as a matter of fact not only attests to the difficulty of digging out a firm level of understanding but also thematizes that very impossibility. On a grumpier day I would perhaps have grumbled about the overworked themes of the film: the relation between the original and the copy. Perhaps, one could say, the film is too engaged in a certain theoretical puzzle. However, when I saw it, I was not only engaged by this puzzle, but was also dazzled by the way this puzzle was presented by a strange progression of events, and in the middle of it all, a sort of rapture that shook me out of many things I thought I knew about the people in the film.

Certified copy begins on a seemingly rather ordinary, realistic note. An art historian gives a lecture on the concept of the original: why is the original considered finer and more authentic than the reproduction in art? Afterwards, he hooks up with a woman in the audience. It turns out she owns an antique store. The story is set in Tuscany, Italy. The two head out on a drive, and the film contains some of Kiarostami's signature car motif: people sitting in a car, next to each other - interpersonal drama in a limited space. The art historian is snotty, and we see tension building up between the two. They talk about art and forgery, they flirt and they have their disagreements. When they enter into a cafe to have something to eat the owner assumes they are a married couple. Suddenly, something shifts. The two starts to act as if they were married. Or are they only pretending? Is it something we have assumed that we shouldn't have? I tried to maintain the openness of the scenes. The couple could be said to act 'as if', but perhaps, given another framework, they could be said to engage in the tired roles, the scathing nagging, a married life can contain, the 'certified copies' of what married life is? Kiarostami clearly sets out to tantalize the viewer with a lack of resolution. In other words, the relation between original/reproduction/copy is worked through on several different levels and ends up in a labyrinth of unresolved questions about art, human relations and the nature of the events of the film. (I suppose there is also a dose of self-reflection in the movie: what is it to make a film, a film with a 'story' that is supposed to 'engage' the viewer? What kind of response do we think movies elicit?)

The force this shift had on me would not have worked were it not for the excellent acting and the convincing ordinariness of the first part of the film. I was lulled into a scene and suddenly the way I had been viewing things was questioned. For me, this not only had the function of a fashionable philosophical little game: the effect was an emotional one, a sort of dizziness one can also experience in real life. The questions it raises about the difference between authenticity and 'the copy' are so well integrated in the flow of the movie that it didn't end up an academic teaser.