Certified Copy

Certified Copy
Caroline Eliacheff and Abbas Kiarostami, 2010
#4, 2011 Skandies

I have played 9:05

I have not played 9:05

In dramatic media such as film, introducing characters directly (e.g., through a voiceover) is considered awkward, so watching a cinematic story generally involves an initial scramble to figure out who the hell these people are and how they're related to each other. A lot of the time that scramble isn't entirely successful, which is why after watching three seasons of Game of Thrones the characters are still "Baleful" and "Neckbeard" and "Queen Bleach" to me. Certified Copy begins in much the same way. We are presented with two main characters, and we start to do the scramble: one, we immediately learn, is a British writer named James Miller, but the other, played by , is more elusive. We never do get given her name. The writer is in Italy, giving a talk about his latest book, and she has a reserved seat right up front, next to his translator… has she been working with him too? Her snaggletoothed tween son is misbehaving, so she leaves early, and she and her son talk in French, not Italian — are they just visiting? He teases her about her obvious interest in "that guy," the writer: he saw her give her number to the translator to pass along. The writer wanders into an antiques shop; it turns out to be her shop, so she's not just visiting, then. Apparently she was going to "help him shop" — was she part of the welcoming committee? Is that how she got a reserved seat? He says he wants to go for a drive out of town, which again seems more like something you'd ask of your book tour contact than of a random fan. She burbles excitedly, "I can't believe you're sitting in my car!" and asks him to autograph a book to "Marie", who she says is her sister… they get to talking about the book… but before long, they're bickering in a way that seems very weird for people who have just met. She doesn't like the way he defends her son's backtalk, or his rather brusque dismissal of the museum she takes him to, and it seems very much as though they have an established (and tense) relationship. Do they? We're still trying to figure this out when they sit down at a caffè, talking again like author and fan, and then the writer's cell phone rings and he steps outside, and the old woman who runs the caffè says that she can tell he's a good husband. The French woman does a double-take — but then starts talking about their wedding day, fifteen years ago. Wait, what? Are they divorced? But, no, that can't be — he didn't even know she had a sister. When he returns, she fills him in: "She mistook you for my husband. I didn't correct her." Whew, so they're not dropping that on us at this late date… except then both of them start to behave, even when they're alone, like a couple struggling to reconcile after a few years' separation. She grumbles about how he'd fallen asleep on their anniversary night, the night before (?); he counters by reminding her that a few years earlier she had momentarily fallen asleep while driving a car with their son (??) in the back seat. The movie concludes at the hotel room where they spent their honeymoon. (???)

I put the question marks in because it was clear that these were moments when question marks were supposed to appear over our heads, but one of the things that astonished me when I started reading articles about this movie is that apparently there was a fair amount of debate about what was really happening in it. Were these two in fact a separated couple who had started off pretending not to know each other at first, in an attempt to reboot their relationship? Or was it the other way around: were they on a first date, and acting the roles of a long-married couple as an odd form of courtship? Or, as one particularly inventive theory proposed, was this a science fiction story in which time flows differently, so that much as Synecdoche, New York shows the seasons whipping by over the course of a single afternoon, here we see an entire relationship unfold, from infatuation to rancor to nostalgia, in one day? But to me, the answer was pretty obvious. What was really happening in this movie? Nothing was really happening in this movie. It's a movie. Movies aren't real. While we are trying to piece together the backstory of this one, the filmmakers are changing it on us, which they can do, because it isn't real. And by making the scramble to figure out what's going on more frustrating than usual, they draw our attention to the fact that making viewers chase after breadcrumbs of information is always an artifice. Certified Copy is a meditation on long-term relationships, and a character study, and even has some things to say about originality in art, but above all else, it's a postmodern storytelling exercise. And in this case, I actually mean that as a recommendation. I don't know whether this is a point the filmmakers were actually aiming to make, but their stunt highlights just how often we see two characters interacting and don't know whether they're spouses or siblings or co-workers or what — not because it's useful to withhold that information, but because the medium is hamstrung by the convention that we have to pretend we're just peeking in on a bunch of people in the middle of going about their lives. It's worthwhile to be reminded that, y'know, we're not — that it actually is up to the filmmakers whether we will spend the opening scenes of a movie distracted by our scramble to figure out who the characters are, or whether we'll be able to focus on what they're saying and doing.