Emigrant Aesthetic

Certified Copy

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

At Lincoln Plaza Cinemas & IFC Center

Runtime: 106 min.

When
chairing the 1995 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Godard faxed me
an acceptance speech in which he demeaned then-fashionable Krzysztof
Kieslowski, clubbing him with the valiant example of Abbas Kiarostami.
In the fullness of time, positions have reversed. Now Kiarostami has
become the new Kieslowski, an emigrant to Western Europe whose
pretentiousness embarrasses the whole concept of art cinema—as proven by
Certified Copy.

It’s
a perfect title to indicate Kiarostami’s simulation of his formerly
refreshing, thought-provoking ideas about the nature of cinema. Back in
the 1990s, he was hailed as the leader of the Iranian film movement
(though I personally preferred the films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf) that
brought poetic simplicity and formal rigor to contemporary storytelling,
Kiarostami’s Close-Up—a courtroom-drama-into-postmodern-neo-realism
feat—being a perfect example. But in Certified Copy, Kiarostami goes
backward, imitating the 1960s European art-film mode of aimless,
alienated couples, as in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and La Notte; he
features certified Euro star Juliette Binoche and opera singer William
Schimmel and a cameo appearance by Parisian film scribe Jean-Claude
Carriere. Like Scorsese at The Waverly Inn, this Persian artiste has
arrived.

Kiarostami
doesn’t have Kieslowski’s chic (which surely is what put off Godard),
but his plainness doesn’t disguise the film’s basic, banal meet-cute.
Binoche plays a French antiques gallery owner who meets Schimmel’s
British author in Tuscany— and they talk. The dialogue gets
self-referential about women, men, role-playing and philosophy, but the
examination is less enthralling than when Kiarostami was analyzing and
revealing the depths of Persian culture that were undeniably universal.
This metaphysical flirtation is stuff we already know, limited to the
familiar Kiarostami formats (automobile conversation, village ennui)
that deadened his career with the nearly indistinguishable Ten, A Taste
of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us.

A
wedding party Binoche and Shimmel observe in their random
tergiversation doesn’t come close to the complexity of Marco
Bellocchio’s far more complex The Wedding Director. Bellocchio’s
slyness and elegance may well have been influenced by Iranian cinema,
but his sense of humor—and apparent joy of cinema—has made Kiarostami’s
dull meta games finally dull. The more you ponder his simplicity and his
incessantly brooding couple, the less ponderable it all becomes. Even
the protean Binoche seems worked up over nothing—trying for both Jeanne
Moreau’s anguish and some anonymous Iranian actress’ transparency. Certified Copy only
claims our attention because of the insistence of contemporary film
culture’s gatekeepers; their faddishness takes the place of genuine
cultural interest. Certified Copy is, itself, an antique—what Godard might call an art-movie knockoff.