Certified Copy (Copie conforme)

“Certified Copy” (2010) begins with a bit of banal dialoguing on the relationship between copy and original, so banal that all you can think is that the characters need to read Walter Benjamin and bring the level of the discussion up a few notches. But then suddenly the film starts to act out the relationship that the characters have been discussing in their stilted ways. And that is really pretty stunning.

The transformation originates in a game that they characters suddenly begin to play – that they are married. He dashes out of a café to take a phone call, while she (although he, an English writer called James Miller, has a name, she does not: the point is that this is how marriages work) remains behind discussing her “husband” and his shortcomings with the café owner. The problem is that they are not in fact married; they have just met the day before when he arrived in Florence to promote his latest book on copies and originals. She has taken him out sightseeing in the Italian countryside. He returns to his coffee, and when she tells him that the cafe owner thought they were married and that she did not correct the mistake, he plays along with the game. Why? The game feels natural, a way of flirting, pushing the bounds, trying on an alternative life. It is a game we all play in a new but intense relationship.

But as the story progresses, we forget that the two really aren’t married, becoming engrossed in the details that feel so mundane and yet tragic. The actors, who at the outset feel their ways through the roles, watching the other for clues to see how they should react, settle in and become the husband and wife they are pretending to be. Their argument is the same one that all married couples have – he is too remote, she is too demanding. We know the lines before they are uttered. As they wander through the village, watch a wedding, stop in a restaurant and finally visit the hotel they stayed in during their “honeymoon,” we are torn between the hope that they will stay together, preposterous as it seems, and the knowledge that he has to catch his train at nine o’clock. She asks him to stay, he reminds her that he told her at the beginning that he had to leave. There is the whole universal story of male/female relationships condensed into two sad little lines, at least as we have learned them through literature and film.

Ultimately the question of the copy in this context is not philosophical but behavioral. The film is not about metaphysics but performance theory. This is how love works: we say the words that our culture offers us, play out the scenarios we all know by heart, and in the act we feel love. Marriage is a script.

Amazingly, a number of the critics reviewing the film didn’t realize that they were watching two people in a film pretending to be married – although the film sets up the game very precisely. A tendency that we Americans can’t seem to kick is to read films literally. And yet if we miss the point that the couple is not in fact married but playing out a marriage according to a well-rehearsed screenplay the film has no meaning, the central question of “what is the difference between copy and original” loses its coherence. The answer to the question is that there is no difference – you can’t tell between the performance and the real thing because there is no difference. At least in human relationships.

Juliette Binoche as the woman
William Shimell as the husband, writer James Miller