Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

... And That Green Illusion

Amir Siadat

Which situation is real and which one is fake? Are the man and woman in Certified Copy really husband and wife or are they just playfully adopting themselves to the position attributed to them? Any answer to this question is like walking on a narrow strip that may lead to slip and fall at any moment with just a flip. If we choose any of these two paths, we will face an ambiguous situation that cannot be completely grasped and is not fully stable. It seems that if we assume the two have never been husband and wife, the situation becomes more complicated. Then, for example, what James Miller describes about the way a mother and son interact in front of a statue in Florence (and says he has taken the main idea of his book from it) can become a multifaceted prism in which conscience, memory, imagination, and projected thoughts are intermingled. But if we consider those two as husband and wife, we have stepped on a path that is smoother and - at least for the purpose of this article - more desirable at first glance. In Kiarostami's movies, "playing a role" has usually been related to passion and vitality. Hossein Sabzian, in the role of Makhmalbaf, forgets the frustrations and his lacks, and Hossein of Through the Olive Trees in front of the camera becomes the husband and co-star of a girl who does not pay much attention to him behind the scenes. In other words, for Kiarostami’s characters, "playing a role" has never been living a hardship and suffering life, and from this point of view, it is unlikely that the man and the woman of Certified Copy would have wanted to "play" the coldness of a dead-end relationship! The dramatic nature of cinema in Kiarostami's works has been shown many times to see differently and decorate the surrounding world, and it has sung the song of life in the heart of the disaster and in the midst of the ruins. Isn't it the fact that in Life and Nothing More..., right at the moment when Farhad Kheradmand enters the earthquake-stricken village, a charming melody from "outside" replaces the heartbreaking sound of noise and wailing, and gives a color of hope to what is "really" complete darkness? It is as if whenever the camera in the film wants to record an issue related to bitterness - like the ritual of mourning in The Wind Will Carry Us - fate and destination work hand in hand to fail it! In this case, what difference does it make if what is collapsed and destroyed is a village in the north of Iran or a marital relationship? With drama, you can repair or soften the inflamed or depressed atmosphere of both. The fed-up husband and wife may become a little desirable to each other in the roles of two strangers. So, what we see of them in the first half of the film is the "role playing" in both senses. In this case, the overall plot of the film reminds us of the play The Lover written by Harold Pinter. There too, after saying goodbye and leaving the house, the man returns home in the role of a lover to be alone with his wife. As if everyday habit and boredom need such unusual tricks. While the two characters seem to hide their faces behind the intellectual rhetoric of the first half, the second half of the film has more signs of reality, perhaps due to the psychological strains, emotional fluctuations and their expressions (the woman crying, the man getting angry). Of course, playing Pinter-like roles is not the only excuse to associate Certified Copy to the world of drama. Apart from the totality of the work, which carries a kind of obsession with preserving the temporal and spatial continuity similar to theater, moments such as Juliette Binoche's make-up in the camera mirror or the two of them sharing a room in an old hotel with the intention of recreating the happy "scenes" of the past, all have a theatrical characteristic. On the other hand, the dual effect of this couple can even be considered in a field beyond their will as a character, a product of an aesthetic selection and an interventionist role of cinema itself. This dual effect also existed in Through the Olive Trees, but there the camera of Mohammad-Ali Keshavarz was in front of Kiarostami's camera so that this duality has a direct reason for the audience. In the Certified Copy, the camera is an absent (or deleted) so that the viewer passes a more difficult test and follows the same way of looking at life and cinema in more hidden layers.

Kiarostami builds his imaginary world in a hard and strong connection with reality. What we see in Through the Olive Trees is false images that are represented and recorded as realistically as possible. Kiarostami calmly shows all the stages of decorating the village in order to reveal the highly manipulated nature of his images: he shows that young girls are no longer good at wearing local clothes, and it was the force of the film that made them wear such clothes; It shows that the pots were brought and "arranged" around the village houses; He lingers the fight between Keshavarz and Hossein over the death of 25 or 65 people so much that it makes this gap even deeper. Although the starting point of the film is an earthquake in Rudbar and the characters - apparently - play their roles, what we see in the end is no longer an Iranian village, because throughout the film, the line between truth and lies is distorted in a subtle and humorous way. We know that the one who is there - as he says - is "really" Mohammad-Ali Keshavarz, but we also know that - contrary to his claims - he is not the director of Through the Olive Trees or Life and Nothing More...! Documentary aspects of the film become fainter and fainter with this humorous approach so that Kiarostami passes history and creates his own village.

The man and the woman of Certified Copy are talking about Jasper Johns and Warhol's Coca-Colas during the driving. The woman believes that because of his position, Jasper Johns had the opportunity to mold Coca-Cola as a work of art. He was able to, because his name was Jasper Johns! Warhol and Johns are just excuses here; The subject of the conversation between the man and the woman is actually Kiarostami and his strange experiences over a decade before the Certified Copy, during Ten to Shirin; A controversial period in his career during which whatever he did was as the result of "being Kiarostami" (when Ten was screened at the Cannes festival, some people - including Roger Ebert - asked why a film with such a primary structure should be accepted at Cannes! Because the director's name is Kiarostami?). Because he was "Kiarostami" he was able to go to the heart of Africa under the pretext of AIDS and instead of dealing with the disaster, he practically left no trace of the disaster in A.B.C Africa and filled the film with semi home movies of dancing and stomping. Because he was "Kiarostami", he was able to persuade his audience to sit for a long-time and watch motifs of the sea, water, and swamp (Five), or to listen to his monologues about the formal arrangement of Ten (10 on Ten). With Shirin, he was able to use all the female stars of Iranian cinema together, but still make a non-commercial film, in contrast to popular cinema. He himself said somewhere that when he presents the photos he took for no particular purpose in an exhibition, they give him the title of "photographer" and what they read as his "poems" today were actually scattered and personal notes! Shouldn't such statements be interpreted in relation to what was said about Jasper Johns and Coca-Cola?

In the restaurant scene, James angrily leaves the seat in front of the woman so that she can get a better view of the outside of the restaurant. The window of the restaurant is a barrier between the woman and the young couple who have created impressionistic images behind this transparent curtain. And the close-up of the woman drowning in "gazing", thanks to Binoche's acting, carries a kind of sad joy that, in addition to connecting her to the women staring at the screen in Shirin, is a perfect image translation of "strangely" looking at "prosperity", and at "The crowd of prosperous alley" through the "window", as composed by Forough Farrokhzad (Iranian poetry). The point is that in all these stares, in the joyful and pensive face of the woman of Certified Copy or the final point of view of Mohammad-Ali Keshavarz - that heavenly landscape - there is a kind of "distance" that is the source of many misunderstandings about Kiarostami. Propositions such as "excessive optimism", "touristic", "exotic" etc., which have been labeled on his cinema many times, are the result of this "distance" being ignored. Should we interpret those pleasant natural landscapes, abstract compositions and the inner purity and childishness of the villagers of Koker and The Wind Will Carry Us as a call to return to nature and Bagheri's inspirational quote a somehow invitation to "seize the day"? The immediate answer would be yes if the camera inside the films did not remind itself every time. It is true that Kiarostami openly praises the comforting simplicity and organic world that we generally see in the non-urban spaces of his films, but does his own worldview match the worldview of those simple and unpretentious people? Can the fact that “the wise men” of his films (for example, Mr. Bagheri of Taste of Cherry or the doctor of The Wind Will Carry Us) often say trivial and simplistic things and reveal basic facts about our existence in this world and afterlife with heart-melting speech, can be the basis of our judgment about the intellectual apparatus of Kiarostami himself? Kiarostami is neither simple nor optimistic as the outer shell of his works shows, which if he were, in his bitter urban works such as The Report, Homework, Close-up and Ten (the latter of which can even be called a "Black" film) there must an element of this simplicity and happiness remained as well. He wishes to be simple and the complex affairs of life can be easily solved for him, but it is not like that. It is more of a regret for simplicity. However, Kiarostami has worked so honestly and masterfully in "bringing out" this regretful simplicity that the body of his works is not contaminated by the sentimentalism of longing for the tribal livelihood. People like Hossein or Mr. Bagheri are so sympathetic that no matter how much we try, we cannot resist their honesty. If some of their words makes us smile, it is because we find their pure world miles away from our mundane worlds; Actually, we are not laughing at them, we laugh at our flawed world. Forough Farrokhzad also wanted to be sheltered by "simple, perfect women", but she was never like them. She could not be like them; After all, one cannot not know what he/she knows! Once you have experienced complexity, you are forever banished from the realm of simplicity. In the words of James Miller of Certified Copy, "It is not at all simple to be simple". It will not be a great discovery if we call him "a certified copy of Kiarostami". At the beginning of the film, he addresses the crowd and says that he prefers to walk outside under the sun, instead of lecturing. But in the end, he stays and gives a speech (a sentence that evokes the late filmmaker's saying: "I prefer to stay alive and nothing left of me"). It is as if being away from the simple and receptive nature is the price of his intellectual guise.

one must travel a lot to reach the complicated simplicity and Kiarostami was a constant traveler; Not only because many of his films were based on the theme of travel, but more because he himself was always looking for untraveled roads. He was the man of rocky and bumpy "paths", and not of certain and predetermined "destinations", so much flexible that he did not hesitate to learn from the mistake of a projectionist for showing reversely the reels The Close-up and make his film based on the mistake and edit it again! Like the boy in The Traveler, he stubbornly went his own way and made his own quiet and pleasant road. And maybe the goal is the road itself. Perhaps the friend's house cannot really be found, but a more inner and lasting truth is obtained instead. Ghasem Julayi, the stubborn traveler, endured the beatings with the thought of an important goal. He did not reach that goal, but his eyes were opened to a world other than that limited and narrow-minded society. For him, the travel was everything. The only thing that mattered was path, and only the path.