British writer James Miller travels to Tuscany on a tour to present his latest book, Certified Copy, devoted to forgeries and originals in life and art, in which Miller postulates that authenticity as a category has lost all meaning. Originally entitled Forget About the Original—Buy a Good Copy, the book claims that the original is a copy of the original thing and the reproduction itself is a new thing. A French woman who sells antiques and who Miller does not know comes to the presentation and invites him to spend the day together. During trips and walks in picturesque, sun-lit Tuscany, the woman begins to pretend to be Miller’s wife, thereby embodying and undermining his theory at the same time. Abbas Kiarostami’s wily intellectual rom-com, his first feature film outside his native Iran, premiered at the 2010 Cannes Festival, winning Juliette Binoche the Best Actress Award. Garage Screen presents the Russian premiere of the restored version of the picture.
Certified Copy grew out of the director’s conversations with Binoche, who had previously made a cameo in Kiarostami’s experimental movie Shirin. Shot in Italy and starring a top-notch cast, including British opera singer William Shimell, it offers an outside observer’s perspective on the European melodramatic tradition. Embedding the charm of recognition and constant evasion, the film automatically generates meanings, associations, and false memories. Driven by Miller’s idea of the copy’s superiority over the original, Kiarostami creates a universal melodrama, echoing some earlier iconic takes on the genre, including Alain René’s Last Year in Marienbad (1961), whose protagonists are unable to decide whether they met before or not, and Richard Linklater’s exciting dialogue-based Before Sunset (2004), which also sets a temporal limit in the form of an evening flight.
The theme of copying is one of Kiarostami’s favorites, evolving from every day and comic plots (in Where is the Friend’s Home?, 1987, the protagonist confuses a classmate he is looking for with another person, wearing the same brown pants) to some more puzzling variations on the topic (like the cinephile rogue impersonating filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf in Close-Up, 1990). With Certified Copy, Kiarostami poses perhaps the most fundamental question of his entire career: does such a thing as a unique relationship exist? The characters meet several doubles on their way: newlyweds, a middle-aged couple (the husband is played by the screenwriter of Luis Buñuel’s surreal pictures Jean-Claude Carriere), and an elderly one. Using them as the original starting point, Miller and the strange woman build their own relationship while also trying to sort out their feelings toward each other. Ultimately, Kiarostami’s postmodern discourse is a direct polemic with Walter Benjamin’s modernist one and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: in the director’s view, forgery does not imply the absence of an aura and can furthermore generate this aura precisely by virtue of its artificiality.
The film will be screened in English, Italian, and French with Russian subtitles.
Certified Copy
Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
France, Iran, 2010. 106 min. 16+