*Note: If you have not seen it and have the capability to, I heartily recommend watching Certified Copy before reading this. It is an astounding piece of filmmaking and deserves as much of your money as you can give it. Also herein lie spoilers*
After seeing Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives earlier this year, I quite honestly thought that I was unlikely to see a better movie for the remaining 10 months. Instead it took only two months (to the day!) to see Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy. In the interest of being fully upfront about things, I have never seen an Abbas Kiarostami movie before. I have seen parts of his very literal examination of the nature of watching movies, and the fabrication of that experience, Shirin, and I have seen the movie he scripted for Jafar Panahi, Crimson Gold. As I stated in my entry on that movie, Abbas Kiarostami quite honestly confounds me. What I had seen, up until now, seemed too far above the level of film viewing I am capable of. The layers, the examinations, the insight and patience required of me to get what he was going for, was too much. As a result I did not enjoy those movies as much as I could conceive a more intelligent viewer doing. This is not the case for me and Certified Copy. I am not sure if he was simply being pandering, and creating a movie that is more universally accessible, or if there was something more ambiguous going on and for whatever reason, on that night, at that time, I was ready to get what Kiarostami wanted to give me. I'll go with the former, though, cause I honestly almost skipped the movie in favor of watching the Portland Trail Blazers' opening playoff game. Despite a feeling of lethargy and reluctance about a two hour, possibly confounding work by a director I have consistently avoided out of fear of boredom and being exposed as not a very good film watcher, here Certified Copy was to give me an experience fairly close to life-altering. At least, as life-altering as a movie honestly can be.
It begins with a shot that I didn't think it capable of topping. In a maybe nod to John Cage, the opening credits play out over a single shot of an empty podium with two microphones and a copy of a book (which shares the movie's title) setting on it. Kiarostami is a little more generous than Cage, however, supplying a murmur of manufactured background noise to insinuate the presence of an audience within the movie, as opposed to just us. But the conflating of the two, in-movie audience and real movie audience, is what seemed so startling and caused me to think the movie could not get any better. Impatient Portlanders began whispering to their partners, glasses and plateware clinked, backsides shifted in seats, and instead of distracting me from the magic of immersion as these things usually do, it aided in the process. The movie and the real world were, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.
Soon, however, this revelation eluded me. Even though I'd noticed it right away, I started going back into normal movie mode. I worried about the precociousness of Binoche's son. I was bothered by the banality and seeming self-awareness of much of the dialogue. I concerned myself with typical movie-going complaints like plausibility. I was, as usual with my experiences with Kiarostami, missing the point. Certified Copy does not exist as a narrative in any fashion. Like I suggested earlier today in my entry on Total Recall (the two movies share some striking similarities), I believe the movie works best if you forget about thinking whether this interpretation or that interpretation of the movie is "right." The fact of the matter, I would suggest, is that none of them are. There is no right, because the story exists as an exploration of genre and performance and emotions/ideas we get from watching movies. It is a deconstruction of the romantic comedy film genre that moves so far into abstraction that it ends up encompassing huge, expansive ideas about life and love and marriage and the nature of being a human being who is alive. And all this snuck up on me so slyly, so invisibly, that it wasn't until the final scenes that I even realized for sure I was watching a masterpiece.
But when I did the whole movie just clicked. Suddenly I realized the level to which Kiarostami had been manipulating me, and it made me feel great. It felt like a metaphorical actualization of the best things about Hitchcock's work, slowly and steadily feeding small pieces of information and working the audience over with a precision that comes from a mastery of craft. Long sequences feel natural, occasionally raw, possibly even improvised, but the camera's moving, long, unbroken takes would suggest a carefully studied dance of speech and movement. This ambiguity gets at the crux of the argument -- that everything in life is a kind of performance. Many of our lines in life are scripted in a way, prefashioned by social expectations and years of rehearsing being yourself. One of the reasons I think I enjoyed the movie so much is that it is not trying to layer its ideas in ambiguity and misdirection, choosing instead to highlight very obviously what it is about, and leave the viewer to relish in the myriad ways he explores them.
This, I think, provides the explanation as to why, once Binoche begins to pretend she and Shimmel are married they suddenly are. Once Shimmel apologizes for being unable to speak Italian, saying he only studied French in school, suddenly he can speak and understand French. Film, by its very nature is a copy. It transmits a recording of "reality" via a process that only works by manipulating our senses. Yet because it comes as close as any reproduction yet can to simulating a real world, we have come to expect certain things of it when we engage with it. This is where notions of plausibility and verisimilitude come from and our desire for them. I once spoke with someone about movies who insisted that the very first thing a movie must do to be successful is establish plausibility. If he couldn't buy into the idea that the characters, their actions, their locations, existed in a world that he could believe in, then, to him, the movie had already failed. I should note, quickly, that the world it existed in did not have to be our own, but it did have to have rules and parameters that made it its own. I wonder what he would have thought of this movie, which goes out of its way to smash these notions of plausibility, to deny the viewer the comforts of formula and relational cohesion. Of course, I personally believe it only succeeds because of this abandonment -- that what is accomplished would've been lessened had Kiarostami used more traditional narrative techniques.
There is so much more I'd like to talk about this movie, about the way it transforms the camera into a mirror, and we watch as the characters regard themselves through how we see them. Are they good-looking? Are they satisfactorilay put together? Do we desire them, or to be them? Or, in a melodramatic argument at a restaurant, the camera alternately becomes each of the two characters, so that Shimmel's frustration and Binoche's discontent are expressed to us, rather than each other. And though the dialogue has the ring of cliche, existing in a world of movies in which thousands of movie couples have fought over dinner at restaurants, the layers Kiarostami has enveloped over these proceedings manage to make it both distinctively fake and performative, but also brimming with poignance and empathy. That, I guess, sums up the whole movie, and is a decent enough way to end this. I would like to write more, but 1300 words is a lot and I must admit I am out of breath. Anyway, my #1 movie of the decade so far (haw haw).
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