Certified Copy: Stranger things have happened

An English writer (William Shimell) arrives late for his own book launch in Arezzo, Tuscany. The book (like the film we're watching) is called Certified Copy. It seems primarily concerned with art history, and its proposal, from what we can gather (the content of the writer's lecture is deliberately overshadowed by whispers and gestures exchanged between a woman in the audience and her son), addresses the slippery nature of authenticity and the inherent value of copies, or reproductions. It’s a subject at least as old as the essays of Walter Benjamin, yet technology has marched furiously ahead in such directions as to keep it from ever becoming dated. The writer is perhaps 50; he’s tall, thin and handsome, chilly yet charismatic; he has a dry sense of humour and a healthy contrarian streak; he seems the antithesis of an academic while writing on subjects that are commonly the stock and trade of the academy. (Could the model for this character be Geoff Dyer?)


The woman having such trouble concentrating on the writer’s lecture (Juliette Binoche) is French but lives in Arezzo, where she runs an antique shop. She seems only slightly younger than the writer, and is very attractive, endearingly nervous, seductive yet moody; she’s alternately flirtatious and argumentative, intelligent yet capable of emotional impulsiveness. She’s purchased multiple copies of Certified Copy for the writer to sign—that is, to certify. Her mischievous adolescent son (Adrian Moore) notes that she seems very drawn to the writer, even while she expresses serious doubts about the validity of his book’s thesis. The day after the lecture, the writer arrives at the woman’s shop and they go for a drive. (This is where you stop reading should you want to enter the film’s second half without a net.) They find themselves in Lucignano, a medieval village where people go to get married, and it’s here, in a moment of transformation so elegant, subtle and carefully graded, that the writer and the woman, who seemed in every way strangers, undergo a drama of re-marriage. A café proprietor assumes they’re a couple, and so a couple is what they become, the parents to the woman’s son, 15 years married, though apparently living apart.


How we shifted from one sort of relationship to another is fascinating and mysterious (though a second viewing reveals certain hints in the film’s first half regarding what will transpire in the second), yet once that shift occurs there’s nothing vague or under-nourished about the ways in which the writer and the woman express their frustrations, argue, reminisce or negotiate their disparate needs as a married couple. In fact, for a film so draped in ambiguity, Certified Copy boasts one of the most resonant and deeply moving—and at times very amusing—portraits of marriage I’ve came upon in a very long while. This is partly due to the precision and unobtrusiveness of the director’s hand, and partly to the seeming transparency of the acting. Shimell is an opera singer and has never acted before, and he seems all the better for it, giving a convincingly re-active performance. Binoche seems to have immersed herself fully into the role (she’s joked that she was merely playing herself); she’s unapologetic about her contradictions; she’s an actress who understands her craft so thoroughly that her craft has merged completely with her being. There are moments in this film that make a strong case for Binoche as one of the finest living masters of the close-up; there is so much going on when the camera isolates her, and none of it feels forced.


Certified Copy is Abbas Kiarostami’s first dramatic feature made outside of his native Iran. It’s both easily recognizable as a Kiarostami film (the layers of performance especially) and as a European art film. Certain points of reference will quickly announce themselves to the cinephiles in the audience—the premise recalls Voyage to Italy and Last Year in Marienbad, while the temporal structure (the writer has to make an evening train), the emotional build, and the final moments recall Before Sunset—yet Certified Copy feels like the epitome of an organically developed story, something that emerged fluidly from a stray notion that must have initially seemed an improbable idea for a film. In that sense, we can locate within Certified Copy a sort of talisman: amongst all the mirrors, the various spoken languages and the inadequate translations that so clearly contribute to the film’s themes, there is also a small part played by none other than Jean-Claude Carrière, who co-authored the scripts for the latter films of Luis Buñuel (so many of them founded in something illogical, yet nonetheless comment brilliantly on human behaviour). Carrière shows up to give a little marital advice to the writer, and you wonder if in some non-verbal way he was also present as a reminder to Binoche, Shimell, and Kiarostami that strange things happen every day. That people fall in love and try to forge lives together is only one of them.

Liv Ullman at 70: a look back at Saraband

Liv Ullman turns 70 today. Her strangely angular, deeply sensual beauty; her tremendous presence even, perhaps especially, when silent; her worry, joy and wonder; her sometimes near-palpable warmth; her sometimes fearsome wrath: all of these qualities have kept me more or less spellbound since my teens, when I first saw her withhold words, incite confessions, and move ghostily toward that climactic merger of mind and spirit in Persona (1966) . 

She's truly one of the greatest of them all, and nearly as formidable a director as she is an actress. She's all the more admirable, too, for her ardent humanitarian work, though the greedy movielover in me would like nothing more than to see her return far more often to the screen, where she still radiates so much emotional texture, more so, in fact, with the force of familiarity. For this reason I figured I'd mark the occasion by posting my review of her final performance for her great collaborator and one-time husband, the late Ingmar Bergman. I wrote the piece before Bergman's death, not to mention that of cinematographer Sven Nykvist's, and have left references to the artists' former status among the living as is. 

Ullman's Norwegian, I realize, but since she's most familiar to us in Swedish, I'll opt to say på födelsedagen!

In the realm of art, the inextricable conspiracy between mortality and the photographic image is probably made most palpable and immediate in our relationship to seeing actors age in film. Watch a retrospective of any actor with a long, prolific career, and you soon notice that the way time makes its mark upon that actor causes the work to resonate more deeply. The almost spectral, larger-than-life presence becomes fused with the gradually dispersed pieces of evidence that reveal the all-too-human vulnerability to time’s passage. This betrayal of the myth of youth in the movies is one of the phenomena that make the medium uniquely powerful.

The mere illusion of time’s passage was one of the pivotal elements in our relationship to the characters in Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 television series Scenes From a Marriage. Over six episodes, Marianne (Liv Ullman) and Johan (Erland Josephson) endure the most tumultuous years of their relationship, finally winding up in, perhaps, their last embrace that literally seems to exist outside of time and the laws that govern every other part of their ultimately separate lives. The illusion is masterfully created through the intimate collaboration between Bergman, cinematographer Sven Nykvist and the two main actors, already familiar to viewers from previous roles in several prominent Bergman films, and the result is extremely moving.

But with Saraband (2003), also made for television and which Bergman has announced as his final work, time is no longer an illusion: Ullman and Josephson really are 30 years older now and their age is not only noticeable but an intrinsic feature in the affectionate but no less unwavering gaze of Bergman’s camera. What’s impressive about this is not simply that we, for example, notice the disquieting involuntary tremor in Josephson’s hands (he’s 82), but that he and Ullman, two of the world’s most accomplished living actors, have somehow managed to completely integrate their own ageing process with those of their characters. As with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy’s characters in Before Sunset (04), the actors have managed to, with utterly convincing nuance, evoke the same characters they played previously and to do so in a way that manages to account for all the messy life these characters have lived in the interim. What’s more, they make it look organic and easy.

Bergman, however, is not revisiting a previous incarnation but simply delivering the work he’s compelled to at this stage, breaking away from nearly all of the conventions of Scenes that don’t suit his current temperament. Nothing stinks of excess sentimentality or gimmickry here (aside perhaps from a slightly winky reference to 1968's Hour of the Wolf early in the film), but it’s played out like business as usual in the pared-down aesthetic characteristic of all Bergman’s television work undertaken after his last cinematic feature, 1982’s Fanny and Alexander. It begins, rather disarmingly, with Marianne addressing us directly, looking through old photos, giving a brief recap of her perfectly ordinary life since Scenes, and explaining the impulse to end her 30-year estrangement from Johan that sets Saraband in motion.

Marianne and Johan’s reunion anchors Saraband, but, wisely, it’s not made the whole of the film’s content. In fact, the more dramatic conflict isn’t between those two at all but between Johan’s son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) and his daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius), both of them cellists living off Johan’s considerable wealth and alongside the phantom of Karin’s long-deceased mother, who remains as beloved to all involved as Henrik is resented. The complicated, tormented (and clearly incestuous) nature of the relationship between Henrik and Karin certainly complies with the intense skepticism of family values that informed Scenes, but is offset by Karin’s youthful luminosity in a superb performance that implies the fruitful collaboration Dufvenius and Bergman might have shared if her career wasn’t just starting as his apparently reaches its end.

As observed in Time Out’s review, Saraband is “less a sequel than an expansive coda,” and while the psychodrama plays itself out in the foreground, the story of Marianne and Johan quietly re-blooms and then fades before once again becoming some densely potent image in their past. The reconfirmation of their love isn’t a magical remembering and correcting of love, as in movies like Random Harvest (1942), but a reminder of the genuine enigma of a love that cannot be managed. The combined effect of seeing both Scenes and Saraband leads us to the notion that while we’re helpless to control or predict the sudden shifts of love, we must stay attuned to that voice within us that might some day compel us to just reach out toward others regardless of what may happen. In short, it urges us to not let time just slip away.