Certified Copy, released on Blu-ray today, is a truly multi-national animal: a French, Italian and Belgian co-production, in which the dialogue is almost equally split between French, Italian and English. Its writer and director Abbas Kiarostami is Iranian and its stars are the French Juliette Binoche and the English opera star William Shimell (in his first film role). The whole thing is set in Tuscany. Yet oddly its nationality is probably the easiest thing about it to classify. More than one critic has described it as "beguiling" and I'm not about to break ranks. Essentially, Binoche plays an antiques dealer and a single mother, known only as "she" in the credits. She meets Shimell's James Miller (an author who has just written a book about the nature of originality and reproduction in art) ostensibly for the first time and they drive to a small, picturesque village for lunch. However, as you may have picked up from my not-so-subtle use of the word "ostensibly", things are not as they seem. Have the couple in fact met before? Are they in fact a husband and wife? Or are they just a good facsimile of a couple? Does a copy have value, enhancing an original with its very existence? The answers are not altogether clear. These are the questions posed by Kiarostami's sweet and colourful film - his first feature made outside of Iran - which takes an interesting look at the idea of copies mostly via Shimell's scholarly author. Shimell is slightly wooden, affected and a bit pretentious, but no more so than an academic might be and he is a watchable presence if a bit stagey. But it is Binoche who excels here in a role which requires her to (at times quite artificially) slip between extremes of emotion at a moments notice. It is little wonder that she won the Best Actress award at Cannes for this role last year as she is really quite something. And she needs to be, as Kiarostami favours long takes on a single camera leaving nowhere to hide for either actor, especially when afforded one of many intense and prolonged close-ups. Another Kiarostami motif recurring here is his use of a camera stuck to the bonnet of a car to capture the driver and passenger over a long, real-time journey. This is especially well done here, notably in one sequence in which the buildings on either side of a Tuscan street are reflected in the window, falling translucently over the protagonists, with the blue sky reflected between them. Your guess is as good as mine as to what (if any) significance that has as a visual. Perhaps seeing the sky and the buildings reproduced on a pane of glass so beautifully is proof of the virtue of a copy? In any case, it's a visually arresting shot set within a stunningly realised film.
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Almost as good and every bit as fascinating is an Italian-made 52 minute documentary feature included on the Blu-ray called Lets see Copia Conforme (or The Making of Certified Copy as its listed on the UK discs menu). This behind the scenes look at the making of the film is so much better than the vast majority of superficial, made for TV features that we are used to seeing as supplementary materials. Here are real insights into the filmmaking process as Juliette Binoche tells us about an argument she had with Kiarostami over one scene which required her character to gush about the great symbolic value of a statue which the actress found sexist and William Shimell speaks candidly about his difficulty adjusting to screen acting. More insightful still are the interviews with cinematographer Luca Bigazzi as he discusses how he didnt at first understand the demands of Kiarostami and resented some of his decisions, only to find that they were all correct. Similar insights are gleaned from Kiarostami himself, as well as other members of the crew. The documentary also features some quite intimate footage of scenes being rehearsed and shot. Certified Copy is available on Blu-ray from today.