On DVD: Certified Copy

It's a Tuscany-set love story with a twist. Juliette Binoche and William Shimell star in the first film from Abbas Kiarostami to be filmed outside of his native Iran. Emma Rowley admires the view but still can't wait to leave. 

An unnamed Frenchwoman drags her son along to a lecture by English author James Miller, who is visiting Tuscany. His book, Certified Copy, is a defence of inauthentic art, of fakes and duplicates; and the film itself is filled with couples and doubles of the main characters. The woman sits and listens distractedly, but her son refuses to take a chair, standing by the wall and trying to catch her eye so they can go for lunch. The woman gives in, passing her contact details to Miller's agent before taking her son away to eat. Later, Miller arrives in her antiques shop. The items she has for sale, she admits, are reproductions. He wants to get out into the sunlight; she says she has something to show him. They drive to a nearby town to see a painting. Their conversation is spiked with disagreement and they needle one another as they drive. Later, over coffee, the café owner mistakes the nature of their relationship and tells the woman she should be happy to be with her husband, in spite of their bickering. When James returns to the restaurant, the woman tells him about the misunderstanding and they begin to play at being a couple married for many years. But as their time together continues, their arguments grow colder and more bitter and it begins to appear that they have, in fact, been married for fifteen years and are in this small Tuscan town to celebrate their anniversary at the same hotel at which they spent their wedding night.

It sounds wonderful, the sort of concept you might find in a playful, postmodern novel. But watching the film is in fact more like spending time with a pretentious, sniping couple who seed their personal arguments with expansive but meaningless statements about art and life. She grows angrier: he's not at home enough, it's hard for her to bring up their son alone. He grows irritable: the wine is bad, the sun too hot. This reviewer grows exhausted with their interminable bickering.

The device has other drawbacks, including the abandonment of an intriguing hinted plotline. In the first half of the film, when the couple appears to have only just met, it seems that the woman's interest in his book (she buys six copies for friends) has been piqued by the fact that he was inspired to write it in the first place by a conversation he overheard between a woman and her young son. The meeting occured in Florence; we know Binoche's character once lived there with her son, and for a moment it seems that we might go somewhere. But the clue is abandoned in favour of much more banal relationship grievances.

The film is a two-hander, with a few minor speaking roles (the son, the café owner, a bride, another tourist couple) thrown in to change the direction of the piece, and to their credit the leads give charismatic performances. Binoche is as charming as always (she won the best actress award at Cannes); William Schimell astoundingly accomplished, particularly considering that this is his first onscreen role – he is an opera singer who Kiarostami discovered while working on a production of Cosi Fan Tutti.

The film looks cloyingly beautiful, in the way that a catalogue for expensive homeware looks beautiful. (It would not be a surprise to see, in a tasteful Helvetica font, the names and prices of the Italian bric-a-brac featured displayed along the edge of the screen.)

As much as the themes intrigue, the actors spark and the scenery provides a ravishing backdrop, Certified Copy never makes the leap from experiment to fulfilling viewing experience. Is Kiarostami suggesting that as a relationship progresses, the couple involved becomes a second version of their younger selves? But that this second pairing is just as authentic as the first? Or that all couples are in a way a copy of some kind of Platonic ideal of a relationship? I don't know. What I can say for certain is that spending time in the company of a squabbling couple is as wearying onscreen as it is in real life. Perhaps an example of the way that art can have too much authenticity after all. 

Rating on a scale of 5 rapidly cooling espressos: 2.5

Release date: Out now on DVD 
Directed by: Abbas Kiarostami  
Written by: Abbas Kiarostami
Cast: Juliette Binoche, William Shimell, Jean-Claude Carrière, Agathe Natanson, Gianna Giachetti, Adrian Moore
Rating: 15
Running time (mins): 106