Certified Copy (2010)
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
In Tuscany to promote his latest book, a middle-aged English writer meets a French woman who leads him to the village of Lucignano.
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3 films that influenced Certified Copy
What critics say influenced Certified Copy
I kept thinking of Alain Resnais’s mysterious couple in Last Year at Marienbad, and also Richard Linklater’s clock-watching twosome in Before Sunrise.
Similarly, it's entirely possible that James and She have never existed before the movie started and are now, like the narrator in Last Year at Marienbad, inventing different histories for themselves to see if any one sticks.
Far from the solipsism of failures interesting ( Timecrimes ) and not ( Primer ), different from marginal successes like 12 Monkeys and Déjà Vu , Duncan Jones's sophomore feature (after the similarly thorny Moon ) plays most like a child of Last Year at Marienbad and a companion piece to Abbas Kiarostami's contemporaneous Certified Copy.
This starts out like My Dinner With Andre (1981), morphs into Who�s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), and ends up more like the quintessential French Art film, the inscrutable Last Year at Marienbad (1961).
James returns to the table, and his relationship with She takes a surreal turn that recalls Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961), minus the chic clothing and setting.
I am not often a big fan of modern cinematic fantasy-reality games, and "Certified Copy," which stars Juliette Binoche and opera-singer-turned-actor William Shimell , does not always escape the pitfalls of the genre (and it is a genre, one which stretches, to take an arbitrary measure, from "Last Year at Marienbad" to " Inception ").
Like Before Sunrise, this film follows two people as they roam through a setting that's foreign to both of them.
I kept thinking of Alain Resnais’s mysterious couple in Last Year at Marienbad, and also Richard Linklater’s clock-watching twosome in Before Sunrise.
Abbas Kiarostami's deft conversational drama (Certified Copy) has the appeal of a middle-aged Before Sunrise.
One wonders if Kiarostami is sending up romantic comedies like “Before Sunrise,” where two strangers meet in a foreign locale and become infatuated.
Many American viewers will immediately think of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, as Kiarostami’s film takes the form of two people flirting and squabbling over a long conversation that winds its way through a beautiful European city.
Certified Copy follows the form and function of Linklater's Before Sunrise, Chris Marker's La Jetée, and, again, Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad by presenting a concept in flux that gradually, seductively pushes a relationship through enough subtly-shifting revolutions that it begins to shake all attempts at framing it.
I enjoy puzzles like Antonioni's "Blow Up" or " L'Avventura ," with characters who don't understand what has happened, but here there seems to be no underlying reality at all, and Abbas Kiarostami is playing with us.
Kiarostami tempts one to invoke the kindred-spirited themes of Voyage to Italy, L'Avventura , even Before Sunset as we chew on his Certified Copy, but to do so would suggest that Kiarostami thinks of them as ideals.