Certified Copy

April is turning out to be quite a month for movies. Everything I have seen has been worth seeing - and I have managed to attend three pretty much great films as well.

Note the verb. In fact one of the strong ties between these three great films is that it would be an injustice to any of them to say I "saw" them. I did see them of course, but I also listened to them - they all make extraordinary use of sound. I will come back to the other two (which would be Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives [which I need to see again] and Le Quattro Volte) - I'll start here with some thoughts about Kiarostami's Certified Copy.

Brief run through what happens: it's basically a two-hander for Juliette Binoche and William Shimell (an opera singer in his first film) - he plays a writer, doing a book tour - she owns an antique shop - they go out for a Sunday drive in the Tuscan countryside, talk about art and her sister, see some sights, then, when they are mistaken for a married couple by a woman in a coffee shop, start acting the part. They visit a church specializing in weddings, a museum with a famous copy, they look at sculptures and art, try to eat at a restaurant, visit the hotel where they spent their wedding night, all the while growing into their roles as husband and wife, in a marriage on the rocks... Along the way they interact with a few other people - her son, the woman at the cafe, newlyweds, an old couple (Jean-Claude Carrierre and Agathe Natanson, as it happens) by a fountain, and various passersby - as well as a few people who don't appear, but have substance - her sister and brother in law, the people on the other end of their phones.... The story, then, is Strange - they begin as strangers, they are recast (as it were) by the observer as a married couple, and they start playing the parts - getting more and more engaged by the roles. Maybe they are play-acting with each other - maybe they were married all along - maybe reality changes - it probably doesn't matter. It seems to me, it is as if they are enacting the entire course of a relationship in one afternoon, from flirtation to courtship to marriage and the decay of the marriage. Maybe. Whatever is happening, the film is beautiful looking, gorgeous sounding, and all of it is very clever. Binoche is magnificent, her character a strange, rather off-putting person, but a great performance; Shimell doesn't quite seem up to her level - he comes off like Jeremy Irons in Inland Empire - though that may be the point. The character is pretty loathsome (though he is given some interesting critical positions - the arguments aren't really unbalanced), selfish, solipsistic, rude, though with an odd, sad, charm - gentle and cold... And everything is combined into a magnificent piece of filmmaking.

I've written before about how Kiarostami's films sound - and it's the sound that was most dazzling about Certified Copy. Nothing sounds like Kiarostami. That isn't to slight the visuals - this is a ravishing looking film, and visually clever to boot - but it sounds like nothing else. HIs films remind you how much we take sound for granted in films - and how hard it is to talk about sound. What does sound do? Most films use sound very conventionally - ambient sound to create a sense of realism - more precisely determined sound to emphasize actions - the music to shape our reactions - and dialogue... sound, in most films, guides us to the meaning of the film, shapes our attention and signals the importance of things on screen. Sound, most of the time, is used in a very similar way to analytical editing - it guides our attention, focuses us on certain elements of the film, shapes the emotional impact of the film.

Kiarostami doesn't use sound this way. He does a couple characteristic things, both different from conventional sound design. First - he immerses us in the sonic world of his films. His soundtracks are dense with ambient sound - voices and machines and natural sounds, tires and footsteps and wind and doors opening and floors creaking and so on, and snatches of diegetic music, TV and radio, etc. The sound immerses us in the world of the film, surrounds us - If most films use sound to guide your attention to the important elements of the image, Kiarostami uses sound to fill in the world outside the image. His sound designs are analogous to his cinematography - the deep focus, the open spaces, the somewhat disordered and random backgrounds. His films give the impression of being free, outside the direct focus of the story - the story takes place in a world that is going about its business regardless of the story. It's hard to describe properly - because it is combining two ideas. The story - in this case, the interactions between Binoche and Shimell - are carefully shot, framed, lit - they are edited precisely, taking full advantage of all the resources of art cinema (mirrors and frames in the frames and all the rest).... But behind the main actors, the rest of the city seems to be going about its business, just there. The sound design works to the same ends - the careful control of the dialogue, clear and distinct - but against the background sounds of the rest of the world (a city, a town, going about its business). Now: it can probably go without saying that these things are very highly controlled - you don't get a soundtrack as precise and rich as this without a lot of work and artifice. I imagine the same is true of the people wandering around in the back of the shots. (And it's certainly true of the compositions, the lighting, the reflections on the car windshield in the driving sequences, etc.) It reproduces at a technical level the general shape of his films - that carefully balanced blend of artifice and realism.

The other characteristic device Kiarostami uses here is a kind of split of the image and sound. There is always a careful interplay between the image and sound, and very often, Kiarostami breaks them apart. He does this in quite a few of his films - most radically in Shirin, but it happens repeatedly. In Certified Copy, that is how the film begins - the image (a table set up for an author talk, but with no people) is broken from the sound (an crowd, gathering, murmuring, somewhere behind the camera.) This changes - a man appears (a translator, introducing Shimell's character, James Miller, a writer, who is late) - then Miller - who begins by repeating (with a variation) the translator's excuse for his tardiness... Meaning already we have themes we will see again: characters repeating one another, even if they don't know what the other have said; a distinct image of an audience and spectacle - we hear the audience, and indeed seem to be part of the audience ourselves (the camera is in their place) - a relationship (between the camera and actors) that will be repeated throughout the film. (Several head on shots of the actors - interacting, diegetically, with other characters - but literally, interacting directly with the camera...

Okay... back to sound and image - and as that first sequence continues, Kiarostami continues to play games with the sound and image - we see the crowd rather than Shimell as he starts to speak; we see the antics of Binoche's character and her son, while the speech is going on, see them talking to one another and the translator, without hearing what they say; then she leaves - and Kiarostami gets in one more joke, when a cel phone goes off, and we pause a second, not knowing whose it is. Then - of course it is Shimell's, and he answers it, and we get half the conversation... And throughout the film, similar patterns return. Several cel phone conversations that we only hear half of, if that - though sometimes, the character on the phone (usually Binoche) gives a running commentary about the call... Their conversations sometimes run into other conversations, or people interact with one of them at a time, and fill in the other half of a conversation. The moment when they are mistaken for a couple plays like this - everyone seems to be getting about half of the conversation, and end up filling in the other half on their own - making jokes with languages - does Miller speak Italian? French? sometimes yes, sometimes no...

More than one scene plays as a tour de force - take the museum scene, with its copies and discussion of copies, its signs and glass, reflecting cases, the retellings of the story - Binoche tells Shimell about the piece (a 200 year old copy of an ancient Roman painting); then the tour guide tells the same story in Italian (and Binoche repeats it - inaudibly - for Shimell, who in this scene does not seem to speak Italian or French), then in French.... Or the scene by the fountain, especially the meeting with Carrierre and Natanson. Binoche and Shimell have been quarreling about the meaning and value of a statue - she has gone to solicit opinions of some of the others people in the courtyard, while he watches her in a series of mirrors. He sees Carrierre and Natanson - and when they first appear, he (Carrierre) is shouting - Natanson is behind him, apparently the target of his annoyance - then they turn, and we see he's talking to someone on the phone (she has the phone, he has the earpiece) - a lovely bit of misdirection. Binoche approaches them, talks to them - we don't hear their conversation (we see her in the mirrors) - then Shimell joins them. Binoche tries to get them to repeat what they told her about the statue - they won't quite do it, they even say she is the one who said what she wants them to say... It's all dazzling - the play of sound, the doubling of the pairs of characters (with the statue, of a man and woman, another in the series), the way what people say isn't quite original, people repeating each other, or putting words in each other's mouths - even the ubiquitous cel phones... words breaking free from their speakers, images and sounds divided, images and sounds multiplying, languages multiplying... a tour de force.