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.

Book Review: Mr. Peanut, by Adam Ross

Article first published as Book Review: Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross on Blogcritics.

Adam Ross's acclaimed 2010 debut novel, Mr. Peanut, now available in paperback from Vintage Books, is one of the most intriguing pieces of fiction to come along in recent years. It is the kind of book that keeps readers guessing from the first page, and may well leave them still guessing when they get to the last. Those readers who are fond of neatly tied up linear narratives will more than likely find themselves tearing their hair at Ross's intricately convoluted story of marriage, mayhem and murder. Those readers content to live with mysteries that they may well never quite understand, but are happy enough with the trying will have plenty of mystery to keep them happily turning pages.

Mr. Peanut's plot is so rich in complex twists and turns that no summary can do it justice. It works on multiple levels and branches out in different direction, so that it is often difficult to distinguish between dreams, imagination and reality. Suffice it to say that it concerns the marriage of computer game mogul, David Pepin and his wife, Alice, a teacher of emotionally disturbed youth with a weight problem and a peanut allergy. Their marriage, despite his assertions of his love for her, is as dysfunctional as anything Edward Albee ever imagined. The narrative doesn't follow a simple chronological order, but scoots back and forth over the years of their relationship. They met in college in a class on Alfred Hitchcock's motion pictures, and the book is filled with sly allusions to the director's oeuvre, many more allusions than this reviewer recognized. David is also writing a novel about his life with Alice, a novel in which he imagines she has been killed, and when she does in fact die, it is not always easy to distinguish between his life and his novel.

Embedded in David's story are the stories of two other dysfunctional marriages. There are two detectives assigned to investigate the case. One has a wife who has mysteriously taken to her bed and refuses to leave it. The other it turns out is the famous Dr. Sam Sheppard who went to prison for killing his wife and then had his conviction overturned. Pepin and the two detectives are all men who are having problems with their wives; they are all men who seem to find their women enigmatic creatures. They are all men who have thoughts about terminating their marriages in one way or another. It is perhaps easiest to think about the three strains as variations on a theme. In fact in some sense this is the most appropriate way to see the novel as a whole.

For most of the book, the literary ancestors that came most often to mind were the experimental French novelists of the middle of the 20^th century who were the creators of what was then called the New Novel, especially the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet's novels never move in a linear fashion, moreover the reader can never be sure about what is actually happening, what is dream, what is the description of a picture or a photograph, what is wishful thinking on the part of the narrator. Ross's narrative follows a similar non-linear pattern. Alice complains to Pepin at one point that he looks at life in terms of straight lines but he needs to think of it in terms of cycles. The book is filled with references to the illusionist work of the artist M. C. Escher: pictures where stairs going up turn into stairs going down, floors become ceilings, hands draw each other. He creates a world which doesn't seem to follow any of the laws of the natural world we live in. The other worldly Mobius Strip is perhaps the one image from Escher's work that is the most apt metaphor for Ross's book. Not only is there a villainous character who is named Mr. Mobius, but the idea of a narrative that is constantly turning in on itself, without anything that can be a beginning or an end seems a very nice description of Ross's method.

Of course, Robbe-Grillet insisted that it was a mistake to try and make any realistic sense out of his work. Realism was, in fact, what he was trying to avoid. The reader who was trying to find some logical peg to hang onto, some moral or psychological truth to life—that reader was doing exactly the wrong thing. Robbe-Grillet wants a reader who is content to dwell in mystery, to revel in the non sequiter. Mimetic representation of life was not what he was after; meaning was the thing to be avoided. I doubt Ross goes that far. By the time you get to the end of the novel, there is clearly a reasonable explanation of events that will satisfy many readers; still he does offer other possibilities. In this sense the ending of the novel is reminiscent of John Fowles' classic The French Lieutenant's Woman. Life is never neat, and a neat ending to a novel is merely an oversimplification.

Mr. Peanut will frustrate many; many will find it fascinating. Put me in the latter camp. This is book to be read and read again. There will always be something new to think about. Even the title, it has so many ramifications that it boggles the mind. Alice is allergic to peanuts, and perhaps dies from the allergy. She calls the baby she carries earlier in their marriage peanut. The actual Mr. Peanut appears in a commercial on TV the night Marilyn Sheppard is killed. The description of Mr. Mobius is fairly close to the advertising icon. Indeed the shape of the peanut is not that much different from the shape of a Mobius strip. All this may mean something. I suspect it does. If it were Robbe-Grillet writing, we'd probably do well to leave it alone; on the other hand, with Ross, one reading may be too soon to give up.

I may not be able to explain everything that happens. I certainly didn't catch all the allusions. I may not be sure what it all means. What I am sure of is that I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and I know I will be reading it again.

Back awhile ago, the Slate Double X Gabfest book club held a discussion about Mr. Peanut. I have it on my iPod. I didn't listen to it at the time because I hadn't yet read the book and I wanted to form my own opinions without a little help from my friends. Now that I have read and written about it, I'm going to listen to the podcast, and if there's anything illuminating I'll be back with Mr. Peanut redux.