Certified Copy (2010)

Imagine a European arthouse version of Solaris (1972).

As a type of film, with its desultory chronicling of an implicitly romantic but also querulous and cryptic encounter between two very attractive middle-class intellectuals [who] discuss art and life and their own peculiar travails against the irrepressibly picturesque stones and vistas of Tuscany, Certified Copy looks not only like a European art film but also like a specific subgenre of that form that was proudly exported, especially by France and Italy, from the fifties through the seventies. [Indeed,] both the matter and the manner of Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy resemble those of Kiarostami’s. The “thin” story line about unhappily married foreigners in Italy. The chilly husband and sensuous but unmoored wife. The difficulty in communication. The road trip that leads to the contemplation of various artworks. The emphasis on moments, gestures, and textures of place over plot. There’s even a religious emblem near the climax of each film (a processional in Rossellini’s, a church in Kiarostami’s) that seems to change the story’s emotional flow. In some senses, it may even be said that Kiarostami has made a “copy” of Voyage to Italy in Certified Copy.

— Godfrey Cheshire (Criterion)

Juliette Binoche (her character is never named) and James Biller, played by William Shimell, are either a couple who just met pretending they’ve been married for 15 years or they’re a married couple pretending to have just met for the first time. Certified Copy never resolves this question, creating a sort of möbius strip in which both possibilities are correct. More than that, it questions how different those two scenarios are in the first place.

— Paste Magazine

James loses his temper over the vacuous bourgeois “custom” of pretending to taste a newly opened bottle of wine before agreeing to let it be served, or merely pretends to be upset in service to his role. Performance is part of who we are in our everyday lives, Kiarostami might be suggesting, as we don a variety of masks and enact different aspects of our persona. What’s the harm in pretending? The question, of course, is not whether they’re “faking it,” but what the meaning of their pantomime is for each character, and to us as viewers. If what’s real is indistinguishable from its reproduction, then what happens to meaning? Truth? Love?

— Damon Smith (Reverse Shot)

When watched in English-speaking countries, the [opening] title, at one point, appears simultaneously in three dialects—French (film title), Italian (book title), and English (subtitles)—which are also the languages spoken, with estimable, interchangeable ease, by the two main performers.

— Keith Uhlich (Reverse Shot)