Certified Copy

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

(Not Rated)

***

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Certified Copy is a “lovely labyrinth of a film,” said Sheri Linden in the Los Angeles Times. A “sort of middle-aged Before Sunrise,” this talky picture stars Juliette Binoche and William Shimell as a couple who take a drive across Tuscany after their paths cross at a lecture Shimell gives about authenticity in art. As he and Binoche fall into a debate on aesthetics, it becomes clear that their conversation is a “mutual provocation, not a romantic seduction.” But by the time a café owner mistakes them for a long-married couple, the viewer has begun wondering if the pair are the strangers they seemed at first, or if they’ve been play-acting, said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. We’re never certain, because the reflections in the film’s “endless hall of mirrors” only continue to multiply. In the world that Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has created, “all relationships, even all identities, are fluid, the real divorced from the reality,” said David Edelstein in New York. That may make Certified Copy seem “rather abstract,” but it is also “tactile and emotional, full of shocking anger, unexpected tenderness, and devastating epiphanies.”