Summer is blockbuster season. With the multiplex playing the latest and biggest from Hollywood, Reel Spirituality will offer suggestions for alternative viewings now available on DVD and VOD streaming. This is part one of this special summer series.
The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has been a staple at the forefront of world cinema for nearly thirty years. Known for making formally rigorous and often challenging humanist cinema in his native Iran, Kiarostami, like many of the most artistically significant directors of our time, never gained a wide public audience, despite having long conquered the top echelon of international film festivals and been considered by the likes of Martin Scorsese as representing “the highest level of artistry in the cinema.”
Classics like Where Is My Friend’s Home (1987), Close-Up (1990), The Taste of Cherry (1997, which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) are not only poetic, alternative portrayals of an Iran that is frequently overshadowed by politics and religious extremism, they also function as philosophically probing examination on art, cinema, and the nature of storytelling. They are, in other words, cinema about the nature of cinema, stories about the nature of storytelling, and philosophical essay about the nature of philosophical inquiry. A Kiarostami film is as much about the method of the telling as it is about the tale itself.
Certified Copy, starring a Cannes-winning Julie Binoche and noted opera singer William Shimell, is no different. Kiarostami’s first feature outside of Iran, the film takes place in Tuscany and focuses on an afternoon encounter between an art theorist/writer (Shimell) and an antique dealer (Binoche) who may or may not be romantically involved. The film exhibits his characteristic philosophical rigor while calling to mind Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Before Sunset (1995/2004) and Roberto Rossellini’s Ingrid Bergman-vehicle Voyage to Italy (1954).
Unlike those films, however, Kiarostami’s project is decidedly more theoretical-minded. Certified Copy begins with the writer delivering a lecture on the notion of originality in the arts: What constitutes an original artwork? Is not the original itself a reflection, and therefore a copy, of the subject that the artist had attempted to depict in the first place? Is not what we ordinarily consider “copy” a direct image of the original and therefore possessive of the same affective power? From that, we may ask: if a copy is no less affecting to a spectator, what intrinsic value does the original hold? In what ways should we privilege it, if at all?
Kiarostami poses these questions directly to the two protagonists and eventually through the unfolding of the film’s narrative itself. At first, the writer and the antique dealer in the film are simply amiable strangers who are taking an innocuous afternoon stroll together. But as the story progresses, the nature of their relationship begins to radically shift. And then, without any warning or explanation, the characters morph from newly acquainted friends into two old lovers who appear to have had a long history together, as though an entirely different film had suddenly taken over. In doing so, the film gleefully defies conventional narrative logic and takes the spectators to a strange and unexpected place. “What is it that we are seeing”, we may ask ourselves. Are the characters old flames or new acquaintances? Are they merely engaged in a bizarre act of playacting or is this something more serious and elusive? Which manifestation of their relationship- the casual acquaintances or the troubled lovers- is the authentic original and which is the counterfeit, the “copy”? Does it matter?
With this, Kiarostami is asking fundamental questions about cinema itself: After all, aren’t narrative films, by definition, fictional representation or appropriation- i.e. copies- of the reality that defines our ordinary existence? Aren’t movies “fake” by design? Yet this fact does not trouble us in the least. We intuitively suspend our disbelief every time we watch a film. In the act of watching, we treat a film’s story with the same seriousness as if it were real life unfolding. (Indeed, some viewers treat their favorite films and characters with comparable level of emotional commitment as actual incidents and people in their personal life.)
If we are willing to give ourselves over to, say, the “fictional” romance of Rhett and Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, or the fantastical adventure of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, why then should we care which formulation of the the central relationship in Certified Copy is real? Aren’t they all equally artificial and therefore equally real? How do we differentiate and prioritize the many levels of reality we are confronted with in art and in life?
As a filmmaker and a lover of cinema, I’d want to argue that all movies generate their own reality and that, despite the medium’s inherent artificiality, the universe of an effective film actually does exist somewhere out there, both as an appropriation and reflection of a spectator’s experiences, ideas, impulses, and sentiments (this, after all, is why we respond to art in the first place), and as an embodiment of a possible reality that is inextricably connected to our own. The creation of art is nothing less than the act of bringing to life the spiritual and existential potentials already embedded in the created order. It is creation begotten by Creation.
And so movies can often feel more real than real life itself, and a film like Certified Copy, which playfully asserts its artificiality while remaining authentically engrossing, makes us appreciate the life of the art and the art of life.