Certified Copy, but in a good way

Copie Conforme (2010)

dir. Abbas Kiarostami

Languages: English, Italian and French

In Abbas Kiarostami’s Copie Conforme, a middle-aged English writer of art history and cultural heritage arrives in Tuscany to promote his book on ‘certified copies’. He talks about the concept of originality in art and the value of copies and reproductions: something that has been discussed and debated for centuries in Italy itself and elsewhere. Although he loves the appreciation shown to him by the ‘compatriots of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci’, he wishes he was also better-known in his native country. A woman walks into the gathering and sits in the front-row, ready to be absorbed by the discourse. Her son, however, is slightly impatient and hungry- so she has to leave midway after leaving her name and probably her phone number to the host and translator of the book. At a café afterwards, the son and the mother have a somewhat strange and charming conversation- prefiguring the tone of the entire film- where it appears that she has bought a lot of copies of the book on certified copies and the son thinks that she likes James, the writer, a lot and has decided to fall in love with him. When the boy wonders why she wouldn’t put his last name on the dedication for James to sign, she has had enough and leaves peremptorily for a cigarette.

The writer arrives the next day to the woman’s antiques shop. The shop perhaps explains her interest in the book. Finding the atmosphere somewhat musty compared to the wonderful weather outside, they decide to get out of the town and be back by 9 when he has a train to catch. They travel to a smaller town and talk meanderingly on the intriguing subject of his book. She takes him to a museum where a fragment from a larger, missing work had been declared a fake some years ago. It was believed otherwise for many centuries. Then they go to a café. When an old woman in the café mistakes him for her husband- spinning out grandmotherly theories about husbands- she does not correct her. Then the film almost turns on its head and it is suddenly revealed that they might be a married couple and have been so for fifteen years. Or they could just be pretending to be a married couple. What follows is a delightful ratespiel where the characters and their attitudes to art and copies become the only markers of what is real and what is imagined. The writer’s interpretation of a statue in a plaza is cold and distant, compared to the warm and affectionate one put forth by the woman. That should point perfectly to the motivations of the characters, you would think.

The tricky nature of this enterprise had been pointed out by the writer himself in the ‘prologue’, when he said that art is not at all an easy subject to write about; there are no fixed points of reference or immutable truths to fall back on. This determines the tone of the film that manages to be playful, but not superficial. We don’t really know what the nature of their relationship is, but the ‘play’ is performed with such sincerity and buried anguish, sadness and erotic power that we are left to wonder if the vagueness is more substantial than anything we see. The uncertainty and light absurdity of the film is similar to that of Harold Pinter’s The Lover and several films that made up the stereotype of European art house cinema in the vein of Michelangelo Antonioni and Luis Buñuel. The Buñuel reference is substantiated by a brief appearance made by Jean-Claude Carrière who was responsible for writing and adapting some of his most difficult texts and continues to write for European art house giants like Michael Haneke. To suppose, however, that Copie Conforme is Kiarostami’s unabashed self-evasive journey into European cinematic traditions is to miss the wonderful syncretic energy possessed by the film. The themes are old hat for Kiarostami and they are reminiscent especially of his early 90s films like Close Up(1990) and Through the Olive Trees(1994). Close up purports to be a documentary about a man who was brought to trial for impersonating Mohsen Makhmalbaf and promising acting roles to an unsuspecting family.  Based on real events, Kiarostami had the same conman and the same family act out their own characters in the film. In the end, Makhmalbaf appears and takes the conman on a motorcycle ride. In Through the Olive Trees, an actress has to withstand the persistent efforts of an actor who tries to propose marriage to her. This features as a secondary, slyly shot, behind-the-scenes account of a film where they play a married couple. Both the films are outrageously funny and sad in equal measure. With these extra-textual references, the easiest thing to note is Kiarostami’s indication- never explicit- that a serious and sustained narrative film in Iran is nearly impossible to make without impinging on the strong reductive forces that have so much power over spontaneous creative energies. To the world ‘outside’, an audience in the west, especially, the clear reference is to the regime in Iran that has been built up by contending myths in media like films and newspapers.

In Copie Conforme, the myth seems to be the free and liberal marriage- a sum (a marriage?) of various freedoms. None of the details that disturb the understanding of a traditional marriage are really that shocking (a husband who is perhaps frequently absent, a kid who is left without his father for large periods of time) to anybody watching the film during its premiere at Cannes. Art, in all of this, plays the role of the foundational myth- one that mediates and interferes in the relationships between the characters. Significantly, in the crucial scene where they debate different interpretations of a statue, the audience is barely given a glimpse of the statue itself. The situation seems to ease itself out when Carrière takes the writer aside and advises him on the effectiveness of simple gestures.

The recurring framing devices within the film- the car windows, hotel windows, doorways are also carried over from many of Kiarostami’s films. Here they achieve a playful alliance with similar tropes in the work of someone like Lee Friedlander.

The woman- credited as ‘she’- is played by Juliette Binoche, the queen of auteur champions from Kieslowski and Leos Carax to Hou-Hsiao Hsien and now, Kiarostami. Her performance is impeccable in her effort to traverse the rainbow of all human emotions and yet register that note of inscrutability that is at the heart of this film. James Miller, the handsome and articulate writer, is played by William Shimmel who is really an opera singer, apparently, and this is his first film role.  The cinematography is warm and full of feeling, mixing bright sunshine, approaching sunset and mystery. Although the film is perhaps lighter than most of Kiarostami’s other works, it still remains an intriguing and beautifully engaging film that should not have carried the lazy subtitle on the poster that calls it “An original love story”.