The perpetual magic of reality

In 2008, the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who died this week after a brief struggle with gastrointestinal cancer, made an experimental film called Shirin . Over 100 actresses were shot, almost always in close-up, as they watched a version of Khosrow and Shirin, a Persian mythological romance story, on television. The story itself is one of those woman-as-sacrificial-angel fables found around the world and the audience is invited to decrypt the women’s reactions to the story: this was art that investigated the workings of art.

One of the actresses Kiarostami shot with was the inimitable Juliette Binoche, known for her roles in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue , as well as English-language films like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Chocolat . After the making of Shirin, Kiarostami and Binoche stayed in touch. On a subsequent visit to Tehran, Binoche was told an anecdote by the veteran director: about a (male) British writer and a (female) French antiques dealer in Florence, strangers fervently debating the question of authenticity in art, whether even a ‘copy’ can be considered a true original and vice versa. As their meandering conversation grows argumentative and flirtatious in equal measure, they suddenly ‘break character’ and talk to each other as man and wife, two people who’ve been married to each other for over a decade. The distinction between fact and fiction dissolves. Binoche believed that this was a true story until Kiarostami confessed that he had made it up: he only wanted to see her reacting to the story as a woman, not as an actress listening to a potential script. Later, in a Q&A with Variety in 2010, he said: “The film started to build according to the story that I was telling, but also according to my knowledge of her as a woman with her vulnerability, with her sensitivity, with what I knew about her soul, about her relationship with her children. This is how it all started.”

The film that Kiarostami conceived that day became Certified Copy (2010), a late-career triumph and, according to this writer, one of the best films of the 21st century. The British opera singer William Shimell was cast opposite Binoche (who played the unnamed French antiques dealer to perfection). Shimell’s character, British author James Miller, has come to Florence to deliver a lecture on his book ‘Certified Copy’, which argues that even the most valued works of art are copies of an existing form, and that this principle could be extrapolated infinitely: even the ‘Mona Lisa’ , Miller points out, is a copy of the woman who posed for the picture.

This simple deceit becomes the springboard for several strands of the Anglo-French romance we’re following, and the philosophical complications therein. Is the married man an irresponsible, absentee ‘copy’ of the charming author James Miller, or is it the other way around? Was the young French woman in his past a ‘copy’ of the wisecracking, long-suffering antiques dealer before him today? If personality is pure, unadulterated performance, isn’t the audience (in this case, the wife) nothing more than a gloriously malleable character?

Certified Copy was, in many ways, the culmination of some typically Kiarostami themes from the ’80s and the ’90s, the director’s halcyon days.

His best-known film, the 1997 Palm D’Or winner Taste of Cherry , ended with a metafictional sequence that showed the cast and crew during the making of the film: at one point, Kiarostami’s leading man passes him a cigarette casually, as if acknowledging the puppeteer pulling the strings of life and death (the film followed a suicidal man looking for someone to bury him).

The long takes showing Binoche driving around Florence, bantering with Shimell, were reminiscent of Ten , a 2002 film where a dashboard camera was used to shoot 10 conversations between a female taxi driver in Tehran and her various passengers. The constant tension between sun-kissed Florence and the dark, stuffy basement that Binoche’s antiques dealer uses, was the best among a long line of light-and-darkness set pieces seen in Kiarostami films like the Koker trilogy of the ’80s, where this duality represented a very real, everyday struggle for survival.

Over and above these stylistic elements, Certified Copy felt like an ending of sorts (even though he would direct one more film, the 2012 French-Japanese film Like Someone in Love ), because Kiarostami, a man who had spent a lifetime crafting stories out of the most rudimentary cinematic elements, was finally turning his gaze wholly inward. Almost as if this Kiarostami was a ‘certified copy’ of the man who made Taste of Cherry , an impostor more truthful and profound than his subject, like Pierre Menard, the Borgesian invention who tried to “re-create” Don Quixote , only to end up typing it up in its entirety, word by word.

Martin Scorsese, in his tribute to Kiarostami this week, cited Jean Renoir’s words to describe the Iranian’s oeuvre: “Reality is always magic.” Certified Copy presents us with a delightfully twisted endorsement of this sentiment: Miller’s fiction (that he is a stranger to Binoche’s character) is magical because it feels unrehearsed, un-self-conscious, real. Indeed, the reality of his marriage is a fantastical story, the story of two people so deeply invested in a charade that their notions of authenticity take a hit. And you couldn’t have hoped for a better director to bring this conundrum onscreen than Kiarostami.

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