Ciné - Club May: Festival de Cannes

Copie Conforme / Certified Copy

Friday, 11 May 2012

5.30 & 7.30 pm

Director : Abbas Kiarostami

2010, 106 min

A woman and a man go for a walk in the south of Tuscany. Have they just met, as we first believe? Have they been married for fifteen years, as we think then? In other words: is their exchange an “original”, or the repetition of a first time and many other following times?

The film adapts this theme of the copy with a beautiful consistency: it is both the connection between life and art and between successive periods of existence. Even this film refers to a model, Journey to Italy, by Rossellini, a film that followed the drift around Naples of a couple of tourists, foreigners in every sense of the word.

The journey is also that of Abbas Kiarostami: he makes a film for the first time outside of Iran, in a different language, and with a star actress, Juliette Binoche. Great and mysterious director (Palme d’Or for his film The Taste of Cherry), in search of accidental truth, Kiarostami displays here an original and uncertain style, mixing the precision of framing with a series of unframings and dissonances. Intended or not, this mixture serves the feeling of misunderstanding between the characters. Of course the “conformity” of the film with Journey to Italy is an illusion. To the ruins of Pompeii, unexpected catalyst of feelings in the film by Rossellini corresponds in Certified Copy a Tuscany crossed in vain by the copyists of a great vanished love.

The film premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, where Juliette Binoche won the Best Actress Award for her performance.

For more information, please send an email to culture_comm@afdelhi.org