Watch Certified Copy For Free

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Fantastic!

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

First i have to claim that i am aware of some works of Kiarostami and that i also like some of his works (especially "Taste of Cherry", but also "Close Up" was very interesting), so its not a problem that i expected a mainstream movie and got something else, even though someone could have believed in getting a Hollywood love comedy after seeing this mainstream DVD cover. But yes, though Kiarostami really took some steps in this "easier to digest"-direction it is still a non- mainstream piece of author cinema, but... not a good one! "Certified Copy" feels like the next, fourth part of Richard Linklaters "Before..."-film series. Two people are walking and driving around and are "just talking". The problem with Kiarostamis work is that these persons are not very interesting and that the dialogues are far away of being that clever as those in Linklaters last work of his series in "Before Midnight" were. The whole story and the dialogues are based on the old controversy about original and copy in art history, cause the male protagonist is an book author, who has written about that. the problem is, that Kiarostami and (subsequently also) his characters don't have any idea what "fine arts" is. The book, his character has written, must be the most unnecessary book in art history, cause everything he is talking about are the most easy basics in philosophy and in art history, which western university students learn in their first semester, if not already during the high school years (in Europe). Every philosophy student will read or hear Plato's ideas about art very early and so are Duchamps ideas even more than common places since nearly 100 years (Duchamps fountain, dated 1917). Kiarostamis characters are not only unable to specify the correct sources, they are also not able to add a slightest minimum to these very old ideas. Though Linklaters earlier works "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly" were somewhat incorrect and also influenced by bad esoteric and new age, he had his own way to interpret things and add his own ideas, which were not all good, but at least somewhat interesting. Kiarostamis characters pretend to be professionals but are dumb freshmen with no clue at all and so the whole movie - which is based on these ideas - slides around, is pretending to be clever, but tells just another unfortunate love story of two adult people at the end. The intellectual background doesn't work at all and even the plot twist, relating to the question about the mysterious relationship, crepitates quite early without any good idea. At least the characters could have been likable, but even a great Juliette Binoche wasn't able to get more out of her annoying character, which she had to play. Richard Linklater will show how a wise RomCom with adults will work in his next part of the "Before"-series, Kiarostamis attempt was a big failure and just mediocre, if not even worse. 4-5 points out of 10.

I like it when a film really understands its characters and as we follow them we can see their foibles and their follies and their humanity being opened up and challenged. The Coen Brothers do this with impeccable black comedy in the framework of a thriller, as in Fargo or Barton Fink or Burn After Reading, whereby the entire tenuous structure of people's lives begins to collapse and we are left perfectly conflicted with sympathy and delight in how this will play out. Then there's the Before Trilogy, and Journey to Italy, which quietly follows its characters learning about themselves as we are too. Certified Copy plays like a condensed version of the Trilogy, and has some of the 'lost in a landscape bigger than themselves' exploration of Journey, yet this film never feels as in control or as vitally connected to its ideas as those films do. Many things are discussed, and layers revealed, but it's just not entirely convincing. Not entirely convincing, but an excoriating watch nonetheless. When this film was finished, I felt like I had just witnessed an entire relationship, from the first fruitful seeds, to infatuation and love and friction and wear and decay, and in a sense I had because that is essentially what the two characters of the film take us through. The film begins with William Shimell, playing the role of modest and charming British academic who is promoting his book in Italy. The idea of this book gives the film its title and what the whole film begins to play around with: the copy. The copy, and it's relation to the original, its authenticity, and whether one should invest any time in an original if a recreation is believable. He would answer 'no' to that last thought. Juliette Binoche appears at his speech, leaves his translator a note, and the next day he appears at her small museum/exhibition/trinket shop, artistic debate is continued, and thus their journey begins. The boundaries of conversation between two people who are seemingly strangers soon dissolves and they are soon fluctuating between moments of bitterness, delight and contemplation, and soon enough in what appears to be a bizarre role-play, the assume the role of a married couple and any façade that they try to wear is soon being flayed. Binoche is utterly captivating and her award for Best Actress at Cannes is entirely deserved. She is seemingly inexhaustible, communicating in Italian, French and English and losing no degree of vulnerability, bitterness or magnetism between the languages, and she has a remarkable way of kind of softly inhabiting any given situation but being able to turn caustic and uncomfortable with immediacy. There are moments when the characters are sitting opposite each other in conversation and they are speaking directly into the camera, and when Binoche does this it's never less than transfixing.Shimmel, for a first time actor is for the most part quite grounded and reserved, but it's with him that the film often feels at its flattest. He's the more outwardly ruminating intellectual, always approaching things with a contemplative thought, and it often feels like the film is struggling to maintain a deep thought, as if in fear of being mocked for being nothing less than poetic. Maybe that's the way the character is supposed to be, but all his affectations get tiring. He comments on Eucalyptus trees being so totally unique, how each one has its own shape and definition and being unlike the other one, and as truthful as it might be, it's just a comment that leaves you thinking 'And?' At other times the exchanges of these characters are scintillating, as when an innocuous pit-stop at a café becomes changes the gears of their relationship, and Binoche begins to furiously criticise his cool, charming bullshit-masquerade. The dialogue operates in these two modes, between fascinating and questionable, but never really finds its footing.Abbas Kiarostami is clearly a man who knows exactly what he wants to do and how to do it, and at the jolly age of 74 all the wisdom and joy and despair he must have accumulated in his lifetime can be felt here, in the vivaciousness and the bitterness of the characters, in the way a camera can just sit and stay trained for minutes on end and let the people unfurl themselves, but sometimes it feels like all he is trying to much to do justice to all his collected experience in life. There's a shot toward the end with our couple standing in a courtyard together and just in front of them is a far older couple, man and wife, standing on the same side of each other, tentatively walking and supporting each other. The imagery is obvious but the connotations are beautiful, and it's the sort of a shot that could only have worked as aposiopesis to the journey preceding it. (Maybe that is the point)So there was an ambivalence I felt throughout the film, but it's hard to dismiss something this lovingly made, as an expression of the melancholy of our relationships in life. There's a blustery and picturesque feel throughout this Italian journey that is hard to argue with.

Pretentious drivel. From the dark weird beginning of her art crammed "shop", which he has to beg her to leave and go outside for their meeting, inside was suffocating. She harangues him mercilessly as they drive... walk, talk, spar.. I kept waiting for some enlightenment. If you want to believe that love is fleeting, that two people can never communicate - this may appear meaningful. I found it tedious, with a few tender, even wise, moments; but mostly sparring and ridiculous. And I really like both the actors, especially Binoche; and who doesn't like to have glimpses of Tuscany. I should have watched this with the sound and captions off.

What is the plot? What is the purpose? What is the relation between the actors? Well as you watch the movie, one understand its an experience. It is just as enjoying the moment, and not worrying about what comes next. Because, next can be anything as the story on the surface does not appear to be logical. It raises too many questions and doesn't care to answer them. It starts being like "Before Sunrise". Charming leads, great dialogues, superb imagery. It deviates from there. Where as Before Sunrise is adventurous, "Certified Copy" is mysterious.The acting is top notch. Both the lead actors take us into the moment. As you see it, each moment has a different back story and the acting conveys it in a single expression. It's like you pause for a moment and then get the whole background of what it's meant.This is my second Kiarostami movie after "Like Someone in Love", and it is just as enjoyable as it.