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.

Artists incognito: books by Jean-Claude Carrière and Gabriel García Márquez

Jean-Claude Carrière

I knew Jean-Claude Carrière primarily as the scenarist for films such as The Tin Drum, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Birth, but most especially for his collaborations with Luis Buñuel throughout the final two decades of the great director’s career, during which time the pair co-authored the scripts for Belle de jour, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. The only literary work I’d ever attributed to Carrière was Buñuel’s memoir My Last Sigh—one of my all-time favourite books—which Carrière assembled from transcripts of interviews with Buñuel and no doubt had a large part in shaping. So I was surprised to discover only recently that Carrière, now in his late 70s, has written a novel, and it was no disappointment to realize in just the first few pages of Please, Mr Einstein (Vintage, $21.95), that this novel was very much informed by the dictates of cinema.

“Let’s follow that girl who’s walking down the street…” As he describes his heroine, an attractive, intelligent, and most of all curious young woman who shall remain nameless, Carrière reminds his readers that we will never learn anything about her that can’t be observed through action and dialogue. As in a film, television show or play, or whatever sort of time-based medium, we’re to be swept along, without internal voices to guide us, gathering clues only as they’re presented, ideally without inclination to ponder “subsidiary questions.” I read Please, Mr Einstein quite pleasurably over the course of a single day, so I guess Carrière’s gambit must have worked. I wasn’t very concerned about anything except what was happening in the scenes playing out on the page, which were sufficiently extraordinary to hold one’s attention. Our heroine after all pays a visit to none other than Albert Einstein, and the fact that he’s been dead for over 50 years doesn’t keep their exchange from being lively. The great German physicist always insisted that contradictory facts can be equally true, so why not be both dead and alive, still at work in an office in an unnamed Central European city, with Sir Isaac Newton in the waiting room? (Add an appearance from Liz Taylor or Dante to this anachronistic convergence and you’ve got yourself a new verse of ‘Desolation Row.’)

Mr. Einstein

The conversation between Einstein and his visitor is intellectually playful and only slightly flirtatious, sliding from Tyro Brahe’s attempts to prove the Earth immobile to the secret life of the moustache, from the basics of relativity to lessons gleaned from Shakespeare’s Prospero, from the enduring mysteries of light to the puzzle of dark matter, from the nature of celebrity to the elusive meaning of the word “everything.” Occasionally they exit Einstein’s office through one of a series of doors concealing spectacular surprises, like in an old game show. In the last third or so they discuss Einstein’s complicated culpability for the development of the atom bomb. All the while the allure of science remains infectious. “The universe is irresistible,” Einstein says as he and his visitor gaze upon a field of stars. “It’s seduction itself… The sight of it is a cruel, permanent reminder of how diminutive we are. It crushes us. At the same time, it amplifies us by making us welcome. It opens our eyes and, even more so, our minds.”

Miguel Littín

With Carrière, my familiarity with his films led me to his book, where as in the case of Miguel Littín, a book leads me to wonder why I’ve never even heard of the guy’s movies. Littín had already made a number of features before he fled his home country of Chile in 1973 following the coup that tore apart Salvador Allende’s still young, democratically elected socialist government. Littín returned to Chile in 1985 disguised as a Uruguayan businessman, meeting with an international film crew and covertly gathering material for a documentary about life under dictator Augusto Pinochet. What became of the resulting film I’ve no idea—in his helpful and erudite introduction, even Francisco Goldman claims he’s still never met anyone who’s seen it. No matter, since it could hardly be more fascinating than the book describing the process of making the film, Gabriel García Márquez’s Clandestine in Chile (New York Review Books, $17.95), newly back in print. Coming after a long period of silence for García Márquez, prompted by a somewhat misguided show of solidarity with Chileans living under Pinochet’s reign of terror, the book marks a return and a sort of farewell, since it could be argued that Clandestine in Chile is the last overtly political work in the author’s career, which would henceforth focus on themes of love and desire.

Gabriel García Márquez

However, García Márquez is not the author of this book in any conventional sense. As with his earlier Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Clandestine in Chile is a work of literary reportage, with all of the content ostensibly coming directly from conversations with Littín. Yet Littín’s adventures are such that those familiar with García Márquez could be persuaded that Littín was in fact the author’s invention. Whatever the case, this is the story of a director who perhaps imagined he might become not just an actor but the actual protagonist in his own thriller, only to find the masquerade almost unbearable. It’s a story of genuine guerilla filmmaking, of anguished nostalgia and suppressed identity, with Littín never feeling entirely comfortable with his transformed visage, particularly where grooming was concerned: “My uncles had worn beards and no doubt that increased the allure of beards for me. I had shaved mine off in Mexico a few years before but never managed to get my friends and family, much less myself, to accept my new face. All had the impression of being with an impostor…” Beardlessness renders Littín so distorted that, in what constitutes the book’s climax, his own mother doesn’t even recognize him. Whether this is the product of exaggeration on the part of Littín or García Márquez is impossible to say, but the effect holds: when your homeland has been stripped of its sense of self you really, truly can’t go home again. Or, as Littín himself puts it, “those who stayed behind are also exiles,” and not even the sudden reappearance of their loved ones can stir them from their forced internal hibernation.

2000s: the decade in horror

What is horror? Something that invokes unease? Repulsion? What does it require? Surely not the supernatural, since so many horror films are grounded in realism and concern real-life horrors, and so many of the best ones are drenched in ambiguity. Is it something to do with how the past clings to us as we try to move forward in life? Something to do with death perhaps—though there are things worse than death. Let’s agree that horror films trade in some form of violence, though psychological or spiritual violence frequently trumps physical violence, which has the potential to just leave us numb or queasy, like a roller coaster ride.

Session 9

The genre seems to shift with every generation. What do the 2000s say about the way we fear and tremble today? Do we need graphic torture to keep us awake through the night? I confess that I can’t get too worked up over novel approaches to bodily desecration for its own sake. Torture cinema is certainly horrifying, but it’s also fundamentally boring. Like a dose of dysentery. The more I look over this list of my favourite horror films of our dwindling decade, the more I see how many endure for pretty much the same reasons the great horror films of the 30s and 40s or of the 60s and 70s endure. They strike a balance between unnerving mystery and a guttural, creeping certainty about something repellant. Something waits for us in the shadows. Something irrational, yet possibly real. Some shard of nightmare that lingers with us when we wake. Something common sense urges us to avoid. Yet we go to the movie anyway.

The Others

The Others (2001) leaned heavily on a hundred-year-old template, yet where the film finally lands is a brilliant twist on The Turn of the Screw. It was also the film that convinced me of Nicole Kidman’s talents. I’d found her too icy to be the sensual leading lady previous roles pitched her as, but playing this stern mother charged with protecting her two weirdly-diseased children in an enormous, apparently haunted house, she was both convincing and transfixing. The film found a strong companion piece in The Orphanage (07), also from a Spanish director, also featuring a woman, a house, and a past demanding to be acknowledged. And Belén Rueda carried that film just as boldly as Kidman did hers. It was a little cornier as I recall, yet there are things in it I haven’t stopped thinking about.

Birth

Speaking of Kidman, I’d propose that one of the most haunting horror films of the 2000s may have suffered critically, and maybe commercially, for not being regarded as horror at all. It’s only in the final moments of Birth (04), when Kidman’s heroine, shattered by her uncertainty over the case of the little boy who claimed to be her dead husband, that its generic status is confirmed. I missed it when it first appeared and only caught up with it later on DVD—and only after I’d devoured Warner’s Val Lewton box set, which greatly informed my reading of the film, which deserves to be considered among the finest works of Luis Buñuel’s old collaborator, the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.

The Descent

Speaking of birth, the birthing/cavern imagery in The Descent (05) made for some of the most potent meta-body horror of the decade. As it became more fantastical, aspects of the film were perhaps a little too conventional, and too silly, to maintain suspension of disbelief, but this story about an all-girl spelunking trip was at the same time too effective an exploitation of claustrophobia, both external and internal, to be written off.

The Ring

I’m tempted to include the deeply creepy, if, again, sometimes very silly The Ring (02) on this list. I only hesitate because I can’t quite call Gore Verbinski’s US remake any sort of significant revision of the Japanese original (1998)—except perhaps for whatever fresh resonance it generates from Naomi Watts’ central performance, which offers some vivid emotional variation we just don’t get from Nakano Matsushima. But I’d rather champion something else from Japan altogether. Séance (00), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s fresh, inventive adaptation of Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon, is perhaps the finest example of the director’s unique, hushed horror aesthetic, drizzled with guilt.

The Devil's Backbone

The Devil’s Backbone (01) or Pan’s Labyrinth (06)? Both films involve children, both concern the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and both were made by the immensely talented Guillermo Del Toro, who hails from Mexico but makes most of his best films, these two included, in Spain. I’ll choose the former, a ghost story, if only because it’s a purer example of the genre, and because the conceit of the unexploded bomb in the courtyard is one of the most inspired pregnant objects in recent film.

Spider

Session 9 (01), featuring a riveting central performance from Scottish actor Peter Mullan, gets my vote for best haunted house of the decade. Okay, it’s actually an asylum, not a house, but this is the movie’s bravura premise, which finds a small group of labourers pulling the asbestos out of the Danvers State Mental Hospital, a decrepit old shell of a building, and combines two of the best foundations for horror: the phantasmagoric and the looming threat of mental illness. The film is nearly as good as David Cronenberg’s Spider (02), adapted from Patrick McGrath. It’s also about the vaporous frontiers between lucidity and madness, between victim and predator, and also a bloody good showcase for a tremendous British acting talent, in this case Ralph Fiennes.

Let the Right One In

Equating the discomforts of lycanthropy with those of puberty, Canada’s own Ginger Snaps (00) was undoubtedly a superb, inventive application of a familiar monster mythology into an adolescent context. But I have to say I was even more impressed by Let the Right One In (08), which took a similar tack with vampires but accentuated its tale with greater specificity of location, period, mood and art direction. It’s just a weirder movie in all the right ways, less generic yet still hugely entertaining, going even deeper into questions about gender, development, and the vertiginous sexual confusion of childhood.

Pontypool

Can I make it up to Canada by declaring Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (08) as easily the smartest, most deliriously bizarre spin on the zombie movie of the decade? It takes William Burroughs’ notion of the word as virus and runs with it like a screaming, foaming at the mouth maniac. Admittedly, it finally struggles hard to make complete sense, but it generates so many interesting questions along the way that coherence seems of secondary importance. It also the confines of a small town radio station and the deep, dark Ontario winter into a cocktail of serious chills.

Drag Me to Hell

I had a lot of fun with Drag Me to Hell (09), Sam Raimi’s return to horror after a long season of super hero hi-jinx—though like Raimi’s Spiderman movies this feels very much the product of comic books, specifically of the EC variety. A pretty, somewhat conceited girl just wants to manage a bank, but she gets stuck with a witch’s curse she can’t shake off, while Raimi sticks us with a surprise finale that left everyone in the theatre where I saw it reeling. Nothing, however, freaked the shit out of any big crowd I sat among like Paranormal Activity (07/09). Orin Peli’s demonic home movie horror is crude as all hell—it’s supposed to be—but its this very sense of the real, which it firmly held onto until its very stupid final moment, that imbued it with a feeling of campfire tale terror that’s so difficult to work over modern audiences with. Utterly reliant on contemporary technology, the movie is arguably designed for our age, yet more than anything else I’ve written about here it utilizes the most old-fashioned, if not primordial tricks in the book. It also hit number one at the box office last weekend. Go figure.