Cer­ti­fied Copy

Is there ever such a thing as true art? Who or what defines authen­tic­i­ty? Can a copy be con­sid­ered as valu­able as the orig­i­nal to which it owes its being?

These ques­tions form the crux of Abbas Kiarostami’s film; each posed abstract­ly through the the­o­ret­i­cal dis­course of our two pro­tag­o­nists: an Eng­lish­man (William Shimell) and a French woman (Juli­ette Binoche). They are a cou­ple bond­ed by a com­mon pas­sion but estranged by the crud­est of bio­log­i­cal vari­a­tions. Theirs is a uni­ver­sal story.

He, a revered author, and she, an antiques sell­er, meet on a cloud­less day in rur­al Tus­cany. A short detour takes them to the heart of the region and the birth­place of the Ital­ian Renais­sance, where they soak in high cul­ture and black cof­fee and retrace the ances­try of their relationship.

It is here Kiarosta­mi seeks to broad­en con­ven­tion­al atti­tudes towards artis­tic repli­ca­tion, look­ing beyond lan­guage and the time-hon­oured mores of Euro­pean cul­ture. Stripped down to its essence, Cer­ti­fied Copy is just anoth­er love sto­ry in a remote Tus­can vil­lage – cob­ble­stone arter­ies run unbro­ken but for spo­radic choco­late box piaz­zas; the tran­quil­li­ty of the place hap­pi­ly spoilt by the sooth­ing hum of wed­ding bells and bird­song. But what bet­ter place to reassess the mech­a­nisms of post­mod­ernism than the adopt­ed home of Bot­ti­cel­li, Michelan­ge­lo and da Vinci?

For all its poet­ry and cin­e­mat­ic beau­ty, how­ev­er, Cer­ti­fied Copy offers lit­tle grat­i­fi­ca­tion. As the gen­e­sis of the couple’s ren­dezvous becomes mired in mis­di­rec­tion and illu­sion, it becomes dif­fi­cult to invest in them on any mean­ing­ful emo­tion­al level.

Binoche may have been Best Actress recip­i­ent in Cannes ear­li­er in the year, but in truth her per­for­mance, while cer­tain­ly accom­plished, is noth­ing spe­cial. Shimell (an opera bari­tone by trade) makes the tran­si­tion to the big screen com­fort­ably, but his innate histri­on­ics over­com­pen­sate for his character’s lack of lev­i­ty. There might be enough here to bait the cinelit­er­ate crowd, but Kiarosta­mi frus­trat­ing­ly leaves the line slack for too long.