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’t stifle my standard lament about why They Don’t Make Movies Like These Anymore. But a more accurate lament would ask why They Never Really Made Movies That Built on These. We’d surely have tired of 45 years of Blowup 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’s 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’t known, artistically or otherwise, for its joie de vivre, at least it produced Abbas Kiarostami.
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’ll soon have nothing sounds a little hasty when you consider what’s gone on on in East Asia for the last twenty years. Korea’s Hong Sangsoo, Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hong Hong’s 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.
In the past decade, many of them have gone so far as to set up camp in Europe itself. In Night and Day, 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, dropping but a single Chinese player into an insular French family drama. Tsai’s Face entered the world as a French film in all but directorial heritage. Wong — well, Wong made My Blueberry Nights 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, a project necessitating a move from Tehran to Tuscany.
Watchers of Iranian cinema — and indeed of Iran — 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, where he took his standard road-weary middle-aged man out from behind the wheel, replacing him with, of all things, a woman. In Certified Copy, not only do we find a woman still in a driver’s seat, but a woman shamelessly dressed to Western Europe’s standard of exposure (and with what Madelaine called a “single-mother visible bra strap” at that). Relegated to the passenger’s seat? A man. If these two weren’t Juliette Binoche, returning to a second tour of Kiarostami duty after portraying the final watching head in Shirin, and opera singer William Shimell, those censors back home would surely have felt their heads explode.
They might console themselves with the film’s 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’s characters are married, aren’t married, were married or — might as well consider it — 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 — which, for thematic reasons, you may want to jot down now — 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.
Kiarostami orchestrates the transition in a manner somehow neither sudden nor gradual. Several of Binoche and Shimell’s exchanges in the movie’s 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’d swear they’d fallen back into the distance of acquaintances. A rigorously realist explanation of Certified Copy’s events has a lot of explaining to do around the midpoint, when the two stop into a café, 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.
The matron insists, in her thoroughly old-world fashion, that she senses in him the kind of basic goodness within that — to hell with his obvious distraction, to hell with his customary mistress or three — makes solid husband material. “Well, why not?” 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’s native French. Trying to explain his lack of Italian, he claims to have studied French in school, but I imagine you’d pick up a great deal of functionality in fifteen domestic years, even made-up ones.
You can all too easily envision viewers desperately attempting to square it: “So were they married, or weren’t they?” But, doomed by design to futility, these attempts to stack up evidence in the “For” and “Against” columns can only make yet more heads explode. (For a deeply nonviolent filmmaker, Kiarostami displays serious body-count potential this time out.) Michael Haneke’s Caché, if we’re 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’s own apparent lack of concern over same, missed out on the picture’s richness.
This mindset, liable to reduce a Caché or a Certified Copy to nothing but a cheap trick, ignores the filmmakers’ considerable skill in creating, manipulating, and — a word that means something decidedly different to Kiarostami than to Haneke — 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’s cinema to explore creative frontiers much farther out. But surely the chance to watch Kiarostami try his hand at it counts for something.
