{"id":284,"date":"2012-01-18T10:35:47","date_gmt":"2012-01-18T18:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=284"},"modified":"2012-01-18T10:35:47","modified_gmt":"2012-01-18T18:35:47","slug":"abbas-kiarostami-certified-copy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=284","title":{"rendered":"Abbas Kiarostami: Certified Copy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Having slouched around screenings of midcentury Godard, Truffaut, and Antonioni, all of whom have enjoyed a recent surge of popularity at Los Angeles revival houses, I can\u2019t stifle my standard lament about why They Don\u2019t Make Movies Like These Anymore. But a more accurate lament would ask why They Never Really Made Movies That Built on These. We\u2019d surely have tired of 45 years of Blowup<\/em> clones by now, but I suspect the medium never bothered to learn the lessons of the original. Whatever its motivation, the muse of cinematic exhilaration has drifted on from continental Europe. Few young filmmakers seem to draw inspiration from anything coming out of France today, and Italy\u2019s silence has grown sufficiently eerie to inspire at least one investigative documentary. For a while there, it was looking like we cinephiles would have to turn for sustenance the Middle East; though the region isn\u2019t known, artistically or otherwise, for its joie de vivre, at least it produced Abbas Kiarostami.<\/p>\n

You might object to my unrealistically empty image of foreign cinema, one as barren as the waterless brown landscapes across which Kiarostami drives his players. (Though more often, he has them drive themselves.) The notion that we once had Europe, we now have this potential savior from Iran, and we\u2019ll soon have nothing sounds a little hasty when you consider what\u2019s gone on on in East Asia for the last twenty years. Korea\u2019s Hong Sangsoo, Taiwan\u2019s Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hong Hong\u2019s Wong Kar-wai; these filmmakers and many of their compatriots besides have heartily assumed the aesthetic and intellectual mandate left by those iconoclastic filmmakers who thrilled American urbanites half a century ago.<\/p>\n

In the past decade, many of them have gone so far as to set up camp in Europe itself. In Night and Day<\/em>, Hong filled a Paris boarding house with his countrymen, each more disoriented than the last, all less disoriented than his characteristically hapless painter protagonist. Hou took it to the same city in Flight of the Red Balloon<\/em>, dropping but a single Chinese player into an insular French family drama. Tsai\u2019s Face<\/em> entered the world as a French film in all but directorial heritage. Wong \u2014 well, Wong made My Blueberry Nights<\/em> in America, but the film itself seems to take place in a distinctly Europeanized version thereof. And Kiarostami, whether out of desire or necessity, conceived Certified Copy<\/em>, a project necessitating a move from Tehran to Tuscany.<\/p>\n

Watchers of Iranian cinema \u2014 and indeed of Iran \u2014 note that Kiarostami could barely have have dreamt of producing such a scandalous picture in the old country. He pushed the envelope far enough a decade ago with Ten<\/em>, where he took his standard road-weary middle-aged man out from behind the wheel, replacing him with, of all things, a woman<\/em>. In Certified Copy<\/em>, not only do we find a woman still in a driver\u2019s seat, but a woman shamelessly dressed to Western Europe\u2019s standard of exposure (and with what Madelaine called a \u201csingle-mother visible bra strap\u201d at that). Relegated to the passenger\u2019s seat? A man. If these two weren\u2019t Juliette Binoche, returning to a second tour of Kiarostami duty after portraying the final watching head in Shirin<\/em>, and opera singer William Shimell, those censors back home would surely have felt their heads explode.<\/p>\n

They might console themselves with the film\u2019s lack of sex, but depending on their perceptual choices, they might have to deal with a lack of marriage. I felt the whoosh of a thousand not-quite-appropriate invocations of quantum physics in post-screening coffee discussions, for whether Binoche and Shimell\u2019s characters are married, aren\u2019t married, were married or \u2014 might as well consider it \u2014 will be married depends on when and where you take your observation. At first, we simply see an art theorist with a few ideas about the value of copied artworks versus that of originals \u2014 which, for thematic reasons, you may want to jot down now \u2014 being driven through scenes of rustic idyll by an admiring fan; at the end, we see two people fifteen years married with a teenage son, their rapport clouded by a haze of reflection and pitted by bitter potshots at several different subspecies, real and imagined, of emotional unavailability.<\/p>\n

Kiarostami orchestrates the transition in a manner somehow neither sudden nor gradual. Several of Binoche and Shimell\u2019s exchanges in the movie\u2019s first half could, stripped of context (not that Kiarostami provides a great deal in the first place), go on between a genuine married couple. In certain moments in the second half, you\u2019d swear they\u2019d fallen back into the distance of acquaintances. A rigorously realist explanation of Certified Copy<\/em>\u2019s events has a lot of explaining to do around the midpoint, when the two stop into a caf\u00e9, Shimell steps out to take a phone call, and the proprietress strikes up a conversation with Binoche about that man she assumes is her husband.<\/p>\n

The matron insists, in her thoroughly old-world fashion, that she senses in him the kind of basic goodness within that \u2014 to hell with his obvious distraction, to hell with his customary mistress or three \u2014 makes solid husband material. \u201cWell, why not<\/em>?\u201d we seem to see Binoche think to herself as she begins playing along. But when Shimell returns, he too slides into his assumed role with little prompting, going as far as to speak in Binoche\u2019s native French. Trying to explain his lack of Italian, he claims to have studied French in school, but I imagine you\u2019d pick up a great deal of functionality in fifteen domestic years, even made-up ones.<\/p>\n

You can all too easily envision viewers desperately attempting to square it: \u201cSo were they married, or weren\u2019t they?\u201d But, doomed by design to futility, these attempts to stack up evidence in the \u201cFor\u201d and \u201cAgainst\u201d columns can only make yet more heads explode. (For a deeply nonviolent filmmaker, Kiarostami displays serious body-count potential this time out.) Michael Haneke\u2019s Cach\u00e9<\/em>, if we\u2019re sticking to ultimately ambiguous Juliette Binoche showcases, previously provoked the same kind of consternation. Viewers who obsessed over figuring out who sent all those creepy tapes, or those who called betrayal on Haneke\u2019s own apparent lack of concern over same, missed out on the picture\u2019s richness.<\/p>\n

This mindset, liable to reduce a Cach\u00e9<\/em> or a Certified Copy<\/em> to nothing but a cheap trick, ignores the filmmakers\u2019 considerable skill in creating, manipulating, and \u2014 a word that means something decidedly different to Kiarostami than to Haneke \u2014 aestheticizing a reality around propositions so simple but so excitingly at odds with our storytelling habits. Part of me wishes that audiences had fully digested this sort of thing back when those sixties Euro-auteurs were were doing it, forcing today\u2019s cinema to explore creative frontiers much farther out. But surely the chance to watch Kiarostami try his hand at it counts for something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Having slouched around screenings of midcentury Godard, Truffaut, and Antonioni, all of whom have enjoyed a recent surge of popularity at Los Angeles revival houses, I can\u2019t stifle my standard lament about why They Don\u2019t Make Movies Like These Anymore. But a more accurate lament would ask why They Never Really Made Movies That […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,31,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-iran","category-italy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}