Certified Copy
Is a copy as good as an original? What are the actual differences? In the age of mechanical reproduction, it’s often impossible to even identify authenticity, let alone determine superiority. The camera has forever altered our cultural perspective on this subject: with film, infinite prints can be made from a single negative, and yet that negative cannot exactly be called an original, since no one admires a negative in a gallery or theater: it is always the print that is appreciated. Isn’t this film print I’m watching a copy? Does an original even exist? What about the DVD?
Photography bears the burden of representation, acting as signifier to the actual thing it has captured, the signified. When we look at a picture, we ask “Where was it taken? When? Who is it of?” A photo documents real life, and freezes it in time. Time is loosened, expanded and manipulated by photography’s younger, more opulent sibling, cinema, which, in our current vernacular, manages more freedom from the burden of representation than photography. We still ask “Which actor is that?” but generally, we lose ourselves in film and ideate its depictions as an alternate reality of sorts.
Certified Copy is a heady, ethereal film that explores this philosophical territory, both as a narrative and in the enigmatically scripted dialogue. The film is cinematic art, mechanically reproduced, about memory and relationships. The two characters (played by Juliette Binoche and singer William Shimell) don’t discuss Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes though. The dialogue instead focuses on the more classic art forms - painting and sculpture - and ponders the merits of originality against utility, subjectivity and imagination. Iranian artist-director Abbas Kiarostami employs the meandering sensibilities of the neo-classists of Italian cinema. It feels like L’aaventura, or Before Sunset, and, despite (or perhaps because of) its crawling pace, is terrific filmmaking.
How is a copy of something as good as its original? Well, if a counterfeit painting looks just as good, it serves the same exact sensorial pleasure. Perhaps it lacks status, if we value the name of the original painter more than the painting itself. But it comes down to perception: the fundamental point is that reality is a subjective experience, and our perceptions vary. What matters are the emotions felt, the ideas conceived, and how our perceptions define them. As a medium, film is the ideal format to play with perception. What makes this film so brilliant is its treatment of itself as a film - it is deliciously self-aware of its own construction, and as such, is a able to speak to the elasticity of reality. It does this by giving us certain situations (a man and woman walking through a town) and teasing with their contexts. What we know suddenly falls out from under us. All we know is what we perceive.
We take conventions for granted. We are used to films being made a certain way, stories told conventionally. If we are presented with two characters who behave with trepidation, flirtation, banter, we assume their are meeting for the first time. But do we know that? Later, we see them hold hands, fight. Are we witnessing a serious relationship? Do THEY even know? Juliette Binoche’s character is sketched out as a sort of unbalanced head case, which furthers the mystery: is she playing games? Is he just playing along? Once you enter a game, you are subject to its rules. Life is little more than a collection of socially agreed-upon rules. When the rules change, life changes too.
There is a moment in the film when tension between the two characters becomes very thick. It feels equally like they are lovers in a fight, or strangers disapproving of each other. The circumstances look the same. Kiarostami and his actors are great students of human behavior; each little gesture, each pronounced word describes a very precise emotional tone. Incredibly, with all the information right in front of us, we cannot say with certainty what the hell is going on. It’s somewhat maddening, but it’s a beautifully quixotic film.
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