DVD Review: Certified Copy (Criterion Collection)

This article was first published at Blogcritics

Iranian ex-pat auteur Abbas Kiarostami's 2010 exploration of the mysteries of the male female relationship in the context of authenticity in art, Certified Copy, is now available as a two disc set in The Criterion Collection.  Disc One has a "director-approved" digital master and the film's trailer.  The second disc has the rarely seen The Report, Kiarostami's second feature from 1977 encoded from an old analog video master made from a subtitled theatrical print damaged from heavy use.  The original was destroyed during the Iranian Revolution.  The quality of the print is poor, but clearly better than nothing for those interested in the trajectory of the director's work.  Also included are a 2012 interview with the Kiarostami and an Italian documentary feature on the making of the film, Let's See "Copia conforme".  Finally the package includes an excellent introductory essay on the director and the film by critic Godfrey Cheshire.

The Criterion Collection gives you your money's worth.  You watch it all and you come away stuffed with information.  More often than not this is a good thing, but there are times when—well, think of the dodgy repletion after a Thanksgiving turkey with too many trimmings.  If you watch all the bonus material, you will learn an awful lot about the film, perhaps too much.  Certified Copy is a film filled with interpretive possibilities, the more you know about what the artists—the actors, the writer/director—think, the more those possibilities shrink.  In interviews they all pay lip service to the need for the audience to draw its own conclusions about characters, about themes, about meaning.  In practice, their ideas and comments are nearly impossible to ignore.  Of course, no one is making you watch the bonus material.  While some of it is interesting and informative, nothing there is essential, and I, for one, am sorry I watched it.

If Certified Copy is a great film, and it is a great film, its greatness lies in its inscrutability.  As I watched, the cinematic ancestor it brought to mind was the Alain Resnais classic Last Year at Marienbad, perhaps the ultimate film enigma.  Technically there were things like the slow pace, the moving camera, the intense close ups. Then there were things like the importance of the setting—as Resnais' camera moves through the rococo hallways of the hotel, Kiarostami  has his actors, Juliette Binoche and William Shimell, drive through the Tuscan countryside, walk through the village of Lucignano and its museums. Most interesting of all by way of analogy, however, is the sense of fractured time in both films and the sense of some elaborate game being played between a woman who has no name and a man she both loves and hates, fears and is drawn to.

What happened last year at Marienbad?   What happened fifteen years ago in Tuscany?  Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the script for Mairienbad, were very clear in the case of their film, that that was not a meaningful question.  Ontologically, there was no such thing as a last year.  All there was was a film.  In life there is a last year, in a film there is only what appears on the screen.  Moreover it is not for the artist to tell the audience what a work of art means. Robbe-Grillet is famed as a believer in the dictum that art doesn't mean, art is. 

In some sense, Kiarostami would seem to agree, the trouble is that the more he talks in his interviews, the more he seems to indicate that in fact there is one reading of the relationship between the central characters in the film, that time sequence may not be indicated directly, but once he mentions how he views it, it claims authority. Some viewers will welcome certainty; others, myself included, favor ambiguity. I guess I prefer what I thought I was seeing to what the director thought he was showing me.

Enough about the intrusion of external material, it is after all the film that's the thing, and while some will find it slow going, others will be thoroughly engrossed.  Whether it is dealing with an aesthetic question like the value of a copy in relation to an original work of art—a question which focuses the initial relationship between Binoche's character and Shimell's James Miller who has written a book on the subject, or the nature of the emotional relationship between the two, it offers no easy answers.  We follow the pair as they meet the day after, a lecture in which Miller is promoting his book.  She takes him on a tour of the area to pass the time before his scheduled departure at nine and eventually they wind up in Lucignano, a village famous for weddings.  At first their conversation runs to intellectual argumentation—the witty by play of strangers getting to know one another.  As the day progresses, if it is in fact one day, the stakes are raised, their conflicts become more intense; they become the kinds of conflicts that grow over years.  It is as much the universal conflict between the sexes as it is between the two specifics individuals: in a sense they are copies, themselves.

Last Year at Marienbad, Redux

Alain Resnais’ classic Last Year at Marienbad which had been at the bottom of my Netflix queue for years finally became available in June. It is a film that has both fascinated and infuriated viewers and critics since it first played in the art houses back in the sixties. And improbable as it seems, it is more than likely that those very aspects of the film that infuriate some movie goers are the ones that fascinate the others. Count me as one of the fascinated.

Here is an idea of the problem. I had seen the film at least twice when it was shown in theaters in Manhattan in the sixties, and at least once at a film festival in Boston. Sometime around the late seventies, I was team teaching a class in film studies for a communications program at what is now California University of Pennsylvania. Along with the likes of The Bicycle Thief, The Magician,, and Blow Up, we decided to show Last Year at Marienbad. This was in the days of the three reeler and the sixteen millimeter projector. Since we only had one projector, after we watched the first reel, the lights had to be put on while the projectionist changed reels. The lights went out again, and we settled in to watch the second reel. Perhaps ten minutes later, the door to the room opened, the lights went on, and a red faced projectionist announced from the back of the auditorium that he had loaded the third reel by mistake. The reels were changed, and we went back to the film. Now here’s the point of this story: by this time I had already seen this film at least three times. It was a film I liked and thought I remembered very well. Yet here I sat watching it again, and I hadn’t the least clue that the reels were being played out of sequence.

Last Year at Marienbad is, to say the least, an enigmatic film. It is not a chronological narrative. Reviewers who attempt to summarize anything that might be called plot must either over simplify and ignore those things that seem to make little sense or give up in disgust. Take a look at some of the admirable attempts made on Blogcritics. The problem is that viewers understandably want to find some kind of meaning in what they are watching. They expect a film to make some kind of sense in the context of the world, to mirror in some recognizable way the world they see around them. They expect it to reflect some kind of reality, naturalistic, psychological, or symbolic. While such expectations are normal, after all that is what most cinema does, they are the wrong expectations for this film. This is a film that deliberately eschews the aesthetics of art as mimesis.

The film’s screen writer was the French novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who is most famous , if not infamous, for his experimentation with the genre and is usually associated with what is called the ‘New Novel.’ Even a cursory examination of his work, especially his later work, reveals that much of it offers the same kind of frustrations for the reader with traditional expectations as the film does for movie audiences with traditional ideas. There is never any constant against which to measure the events of the story. What appears to be happening turns out to be a description of a painting. Characters morph from photos into action. Sequences of events are repeated with slight changes sometimes, significant changes at other times. Time is fractured. For Robbe-Grillet, realistic representation of the world is the one thing to be avoided at all costs. The key statement of his aesthetic is a little book of essays called For a New Novel. What he has to say about the novel in this book would seem to explain as well what he and Resnais were trying to do in their collaboration on Last Year at Marienbad.

The central point of an essay called “A Future for the Novel” is the insistence that it is a mistake to look for meaning in the new novel. The novelist creates things that are, not things that mean. Here for example is Robbe-Grillet: “Instead of this universe of ‘signification’ (psychological, social, functional), we must try, then, to construct a world both more solid and more immediate. Let it be first by their presence that objects and gestures establish themselves, and let this presence continue to prevail over whatever explanatory theory that may try to enclose them in a system of references, whether emotional, sociological, Freudian, or metaphysical.” What is true for the future of the novel envisioned by Robbe-Grillet is no less true for the screen play he wrote for his collaboration with Resnais. They have created a ‘presence.’

In an introduction he wrote for the Grove Press edition of the screenplay, he suggests that the only people who will have trouble understanding the film will be those who try to find some kind of rationale explanation for what they are seeing. “This spectator,” he writes, will certainly find the film difficult, if not incomprehensible. . . . “ The spectator, on the other hand, who “lets himself be carried along by the extraordinary images in front of him, by the actor’s voices, by the sound track, by the music, by the rhythm of the cutting, by the passion of the characters. . . to this spectator the film will seem the ‘easiest’ he has ever seen. . . .” It is a film, in this sense, that is not meant to be experienced rationally. It is a film that is meant to be experienced, period. It does not mean something. It is something. To paraphrase the poet: a movie should not mean; a movie must be.

Perhaps, one needs to speak of Last Year at Marienbad in the same way one speaks about a string quartet. Don’t ask what it means. Experience what it is.