For complex reasons, I saw the movie Certified Copy. While I watched it — in a theater in Rhinebeck, New York — I was mildly pleased. Juliette Binoche is much better than in Chocolat, the only other film of hers I’ve seen. There she was young, creamy and Disney-ish. Now she is nearly-old, weary and fierce.
But the moment I left the theater, I met the young philosopher Olivia Custer, who despised the film. And suddenly I lost faith in Abbas Kiarostami’s vision. Certified Copy is like American foreign policy (which it resembles, being both meandering and tenacious*); one cannot defend it.
Nonetheless, I must say: this film has more bell-ringing than any movie ever made. Mostly you hear the bells, but right near the end you actually see two bells clanging, in a church tower. For a moment, the film almost makes sense.
Certified Copy brings to mind Anita Ward’s magnificent Disco song "Ring My Bell" (1979):
The night is young and full of possibilities.
Well, come on and let yourself be free…
You can ring my bell, ring my bell (ding-dong-ding);
You can ring my bell, ring my bell (ding-dong-ding).
The story of Certified Copy is the story of my friend Marcus Boon (though hopefully he will not meet any bitter ex-wives on his international book tour). Marcus is a British intellectual who wrote a philosophical book about copying. In the film, James Miller is a British intellectual who wrote a philosophical book about copying. Did Kiarostami copy Marcus? (Get it?) We will probably never know. (Did one of the director’s interns Google In Praise of Copying?)
I’ll tell you this, though. Marcus is full of ideas, while James Miller is basically a dope. Miller’s big theory is that "the virtue of copying is that it leads us back to the original." If that’s the only point of copies, why write a book about them?
I can’t believe New York magazine called this movie "whimsically mysterious"! If you turn on a movie camera and shoot anything for one hour and 46 minutes, without any preordained plan, it will look like Certified Copy. The world is whimsically mysterious, not that film.
*Just as America refuses to leave Afghanistan, James and Elle won’t exit the Italian hill town of Lucignano.