Culture

Prospect recommends: Certified Copy

August 30, 2010
"it seems to stop the clock—and perhaps your heart too"
"it seems to stop the clock—and perhaps your heart too"
Certified Copy

dir Abbas Kiarostami. On general release from 3rd September

It's easy to take for granted the fact that one of the great men of cinema is still regularly making movies—especially since his films of late have been such minimalist affairs. Abbas Kiarostami politely stopped accepting awards some years ago because there's no more room for them at the Tehran cinema museum. One critic wrote: "We're living in the age of Kiarostami, but we don't yet know it." He's famously daring in what his stories leave out (Jaws without the shark doesn't get close); so, to some, his new film Certified Copy seems disappointingly conventional. We see a couple meet in Italy, go for a drive and get to know each other.

Or do we? Doubts about the nature of the couple, the moment, and what we're watching begin to drift through Kiarostami's summer romance like the perfume of orange blossom, and soon the film is subtly multiple. Film fans begin to realise that they're watching Roberto Rossellini's movie Voyage to Italy and, in a way, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Except that Certified Copy isn't that postmodern. It casts a spell and seems to stop the clock—and perhaps your heart too—when Juliette Binoche is acting straight into the lens. Lightness in cinema is hard to do. Kiarostami, somehow, combines it with profound questions about the nature of love.

Mark Cousins is a film critic and director