Somewhere in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India there’s a striking image about how our mind smooths over the rough edges of things we see and hear “as one tidies the ground after extracting a weed.”
I thought of that recently after seeing a movie called “Certified Copy,” by Abbas Karostani. I urge you to see it, for its pleasures are many, but at the same time I have to give fair warning: if you do plan to see it, you might want to stop reading this, because I’m going to wander about a bit through the movie’s rather tricky and intricate plot.
Coming out of the cinema, my girlfriend and I ran into a friend, who asked what film we’d seen. When we told her, she marveled at it as we did but said she was still confused as to whether the couple portrayed in the movie was actually married. I replied almost immediately, “Oh, well, by the end of the movie there was no doubt in my mind that, yes, they were married, no question.” I looked at my girlfriend and she smiled. She was not at all sure. As the three of us stood on the sidewalk discussing it, I realized I’d probably been guilty of what Forster was talking about. Smoothing over the rough edges so it made perfect sense to me. Perhaps, said my astute life partner, Karostani wanted the issue to remain as ambiguous as it seemed.
Consider: a man comes to a small Italian town to deliver a talk about his recently published book. The book, called Certified Copy, deals with copies of works of art – sculpture seems highlighted – discussing in a philosophical way whether copies, assuming their duplication to be flawless, are less artistically meaningful than the originals.
Into the hall where this lecture is being given comes a woman (played by Juliet Binoche), who is followed, somewhat reluctantly, by a young boy (eleven, twelve?). Binoche sits in the first row, in the reserved seats, next to the man who introduced the speaker (who has earlier been acknowledged as the translator of the book). Later, while our author is lecturing, Binoche has a brief, whispered conversation with the translator, scribbles something on a piece of paper (presumably her address and/or phone number), passes it to the translator and leaves, her young lad still in tow, and he still absorbed by his hand-held. The camera quits the hall and follows the two of them, kid still dawdling, still texting or game-playing, and always walking several paces behind his mother. They stop at a small café where the boy teases the mother about planning to meet this man (the author, presumably) because she wants to fall in love with him, which the mother heatedly denies.
Next we see the author arrive at Juliet’s shop (and perhaps living quarters), where she sells art reproductions. The visit is obviously pre-arranged. She offers him a cup of coffee but, since he is anxious to get out and about, they begin a journey to a location where she wants to show him something (a work of art). He makes a point of saying he must be back to catch a train at 9 o’clock.
They drive a while, arguing about different ideas in his book. At that point Binoche’s talk and behavior have a rather confrontational quality: picky, provocative. He, though aloof and certain of his views, remains polite and formal.
As their journey proceeds, the conversation becomes both more prickly and more personal. Something unsaid, something threatening seems to hover between them, a deeper quarrel hidden beneath the one they’re having about art. At a café where they’ve paused for coffee, Binoche falls into a conversation with the proprietress when the man steps outside the café to take a call. The café’s owner has obviously assumed that they were husband and wife (something that we, as viewers, find amusing, since we are certain it’s not true) and they discuss the difficulties and advantages of married life. A surprise: rather than correcting the woman’s perception, Binoche, perhaps going along with the gag, begins to respond as if she and the author actually are married. After a moment or two, the author returns to the café, his shortcomings as a husband now having been thoroughly aired (he only shaves every other day, according to Binoche, and their wedding day was, unfortunately, not one of his shaving days). But wait! That was a characteristic Binoche attributed to her real husband! However – it turns out – the author in due course admits to this same flaw! Now we, as viewers, are becoming uneasy. What’s going on here?
Then the author, still standing at the side of the table, in full lecture mode, begins to tell a story about a woman and son he observed walking in Signoria Square in Florence (the son walking significantly behind his mother, as we had observed Juliet and her son do). He speaks of the boy’s admiring Michelangelo’s statue of David in the square, which the mother (in his story) hastens to tell him is not the original. The original, she tells him, is in the Accademia Gallery. Strangely, and unsettling, by the time our author is halfway through his story, Binoche has begun to cry. “I was not well then,” she says, or words to that effect.
As the film continues, the couple acts more and more as a married couple would, exchanging memories, chiding each other for this or that past behavior, the man at one point asking, with increasing venom, whether, on an occasion he seems to recall vividly, when she had fallen asleep at the wheel on a drive from Rome to Florence while her son slept in the back seat, “Had you stopped loving our son? Is that why you fell asleep? Had you stopped loving me?” (This is said in retaliation, or at least in response, to a comment by Binoche that he had fallen asleep on their fifteenth wedding anniversary, which was presumably the previous night!)
As they continue to act, talk and quarrel like a married couple, one is left to wonder. Perhaps they are actually married? Or are they both playing out a fantasy that they are? If so, why? What are the stakes here? In the end, seductively lying on a bed in the hotel room she claims was where they spent their wedding night (although he claims not to remember), the lovely Juliet Binoche begs him to stay (“isn’t it better not to be alone, despite the difficulties?”) but he refuses, reminding her of the train he has to catch at 9 o’clock. At the very last, we see him alone on the landing, looking at the camera, dithering, perhaps (his expression very unclear) before turning back toward the room where she lies. He disappears from the frame of the movie as church bells toll clamorously in the background). Ambiguous to the end.
Is it a marriage? A real one, or a copy? Certified or not? More important, as with their earlier discussions of “certified copies” in art, does it make a difference? Her loneliness, bordering on despair, is just as acute; his coldness and distance (and the obvious pain behind it) are just as pronounced. You realize finally that the author’s assertion about the appreciation of art being “all a matter of perception” has been right on the money. It’s all about perception. Unless, of course, I’m still smoothing over ground where weeds were uprooted, that I ought to have left alone.
