Certified Copy

In director Abbas Kiarostami's playful, provocative, literate film (his first made outside of his native Iran), Juliette Binoche stars as a French immigrant (identified only as Elle or She), who is raising her son while running an antique shop in the Northern Italian village of Arezzo, not far from Florence. One day she attends a lecture by James Miller (operatic baritone William Shimell), a British art scholar whose book Certified Copy delves into the relationship between the real and the fake—ultimately asserting that an artistic reproduction might be considered as good as the original. Even though some parts of Miller's concept infuriate her, she buys six copies of the book, and after one thing leads to another, the pair subsequently embark on a leisurely drive through the Tuscan countryside to bucolic Lucignano. In an interlude at a trattoria, the bourgeois proprietor (Gianna Giachetti) assumes they're a married couple and shares her traditionally sexist views about husbands-and-wives. By the time they reach a hotel—where she insists they spent their wedding night 15 years earlier—it's uncertain whether she and Miller are really strangers to each other or an estranged couple slyly playing out a charming, elaborately surreal masquerade. Recommended. [Note: DVD/Blu-ray extras include director Abbas Kiarostami's rarely seen 1977 film The Report (109 min.), a “Let's See Copia conforme” making-of featurette with interviews of Kiarostami and costars Juliette Binoche and William Shimell (52 min.), a new interview with Kiarostami (16 min.), trailers, and a booklet featuring an essay by film critic Godfrey Cheshire. Bottom line: a fine extras package for an interesting film.] (S. Granger)