From the title, Abbas Kiarostami gives an idea of the theoretical and philosophical substratum of his movie: The theme of the relationship between art and life , thinking about the simulacrum in its relationship to reality has ceased to cross Western art. It is surprising that an Iranian filmmaker who films for the first time in Europe to give such a deep conceptual, artistic and aesthetic to a banal story, that of a couple who splits time one afternoon in the streets of Lucignano in Tuscany. Yet the theoretical framework of the film, a reflection on the relationship between life and art, between the ideal of love and the reality of the couple and ultimately the fault lines between truth and false in a work of fiction comes with great subtlety and without cumbersome because Kiarostami knows how to give flesh to its history and presence.
The story of James, an Anglo-Saxon writer who comes to Tuscany in a lecture on his latest book on the relationship between the original and the copy in the art, and the character played by Juliette Binoche (character curiously unnamed), a French art dealer living and working in Tuscany, begins as a romantic comedy but in the middle of the film a failover occurs. Taking advantage of a misunderstanding caused by a café waitress who takes a husband and wife, the story suddenly plunged into another dimension and the viewer is constantly asking: where is the truth and fiction in this film? Is this an old couple who plays the comedy of a new encounter or a man and a woman coming to meet and play the comedy of an elderly couple in crisis? This line fracture in the narrative transforms the data and temporal perceptions: what we took to the beginning is actually the end of the story of a couple married for 15 years and who will, throughout a afternoon spent strolling through the streets of Lucignano in Tuscany, revisiting the scene of their love before the announced departure of the husband. This game with the simulacrum is exciting and disturbing, it is destabilizing because it opens the story on an abyss of false pretenses, false and true comedy drama or both mixed and interchangeable.
What is exciting in Kiarostami's film is he just plays with the expectations of spectators trying to copy American romantic comedies, leaving hollow pierce the symbolic killing game is to follow. We go to a movie of George Ernest Lubitsh Cooker or a film by Ingmar Bergman, one begins in a kind of romance like those that abound in contemporary American cinema with a little twist own hand to Kiarostami and it ends in "scenes married life, that is to say in a film that takes cruelty as a form of unveiling the truth and as uncompromising aesthetics of a thousand instead of a romantic comedy.
The manner in which Kiarostami plays with the intertext is quite exhilarating, although somewhat pessimistic. The relationship between the original and the copy is available and on several levels, bringing the viewer face a dizzying conceptual: the couple were first looking to find love again in a frayed and tarnished the bursts of passion of yesteryear , replaying them in a false start of their romance, it also couples twirling to the sound of music wedding, are also destined to be only a pale copy serial and almost interchangeable Ideally the couple. Of course it's also inspired Kiarostami and imitating some cult films to better process and deconstruct them. Much has been made of the influence of Rossellini on Kiarostami's cinema, which is even more evident in this film. There is an element of parody and irony in this reference to the master of Neorealism: Rossellini as if in "Italian Journey" saved his marriage in extremis, having plunged into the sensory experiences and existential Naples, Kiarostami does not allow its torque no conversion ontological.
This contrasts with the pessimism and original designs something deeper without doubt, a state of modern cinema where redemption is impossible, where the caesura of the story remains a gap that does laugh fills, where the temptation of serial reproduction of art and life, illustrated by the multiplicity of couples celebrating their wedding innocently in the streets of Lucignano, leaves more room for belief in the virginity of art and its redemptive powers. This pessimistic is even more surprising coming from a filmmaker who had just shown his debut this mystical faith in the camera as a tool for rescue of reality. We remember that in "And Life Goes On", the filmmaker character walk the streets and landscapes of the village of Koker destroyed by the quake, trying to dig the life out from under the rubble, detecting with his eye and his camera hypersensitive signs of life still fragile and all throbbing. In this film the tragedy of death and faith in the renewal of life were both carried by a prescience of the power of the image as the icon of immortality. This mystical-realistic vein actually quite akin to fiber Rossellini.
In Certified Copy, it seems to have overtaken and trampled this golden age, a postmodern cinema in which the meaning is lost in surcadrages, in which reality and its representation are too distant from each other to dock and escape. The bitterness of the characters and by extension that of the filmmaker paints a rather pessimistic conclusion after all of modern art. One also wonders if this pessimism is the fact that Kiarostami films outside Iran for the first time. For an Iranian filmmaker, he has certainly capture the essence of European art, not just as a decorative element of a story as old as the hills. The choice of Tuscany as part Film is obviously no coincidence, since this is the region that saw the artistic renaissance in Europe. Paradoxically, the revival of the couple will not occur and the filmmaker seems to cast a glance on this story without magic, finding the tipping Western art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The place that the director gives the simulacrum gives the film a scathing side.
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