The charming “Certified Copy” represents a major change for the respected Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. It’s his first feature made outside his home country, and his first with a major actor — namely, Juliette Binoche, a French star who ranks up there with Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert.
Here she portrays a French immigrant, identified only as She, who’s trying to raise a precocious 10-year-old son while running a small, subterranean antique shop in the Italian village of Arezzo, not far from Florence.
One sunny day she attends a lecture by art scholar named James Miller, who’s just written a book called “Certified Copy,” which explores the relationship between the real and the fake.
Attracted to the good-looking, middle-aged writer (played by British opera singer William Shimell), she buys six copies of his book — even though, she says, “Some parts angered me.” She also offers to take him on a leisurely drive through the Tuscan countryside.
They visit courtyards, a museum, a church and a cafe. While James is on his cellphone outside the cafe, She has a long talk with an elderly woman who assumes the couple’s married and offers advice about dealing with husbands.
James returns to the table, and his relationship with She takes a surreal turn that recalls Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961), minus the chic clothing and setting.
To tell more about “Certified Copy” would be a disservice. Suffice it to say that it is literate and engrossing, with excellent performances by Binoche, who won the best-actress prize last year at Cannes, and Shimell, in his screen debut.
One can only wonder what 70-year-old Kiarostami, whose “Taste of Cherry” took the top prize at Cannes in 1997, will delight us with next.