Certified Copy (2010, Copie conforme)

2 people explore the treasures of Tuscany on a lazy Sunday afternoon.  They are at first strangers, but the things they say to each other leave us questioning the nature of their relationship.  I didn’t have to make up my mind as to Juliette Binoche and William Shimell’s relationship.  It is obvious to me what is happening in Certified Copy, but whether or not we believe Binoche and Shimell are married is not the focus of the film. The film works as a puzzle.   It remains mysterious and objective, asking us to consider where the true worth of human experience exists: in a happy past or a less romantic present.

Shimell, an English opera singer, plays James Miller, an art expert who has written a book called Certified Copy, about the worth and unique authenticity of art forgeries.  He argues that a reproduction is just as valuable as the original, partly because the original is itself a copy of a real event.  Binoche plays an unnamed woman, a fan with a teenage son who waits impatiently while James is giving a lecture.  Her son teases her, insinuating his mom has a crush on the author.  And, she seems to.  Binoche leaves her number with his Italian translator and she and James meet on a Sunday.  He signs multiple copies of his book for her, one made out to her sister, Marie, who with her simple love for her husband is in sympathy with James’ philosophy of art forgeries: it is not the work itself that has value; it is our appreciation of it that gives it its value.

Their dialogue is imprecise and mawkish when James first meets her.  Binoche is self-conscious and excited to be in the author’s presence.  They take a drive.  “I can’t believe you’re sitting in my car.”  This shot is amazing.  For several minutes, Binoche and Shimell are in a two-shot, photographed from outside the car, and the reflection of the buildings on both sides of the street obscure, in flashes, both actors.  Their dialogue is innocuous but the scene is riveting.  We’re really seeing two images; a visual clue to the idea of the film.  There are overlaid images in many moments in Certified Copy.  Director Abbas Kiarostami’s directorial approach at first seems breezy and loose, but in Shimell’s and Binoche’s first scene together as they wander about her shop, precise choreography between the two leaves Shimell alone among many art forgeries, and Binoche reflected in a small mirror in the background.  They face each other even when they are separated in the filmed frame.  A similar image happens later, when Shimell stands alone near a motorbike and in the side mirror Binoche is reflected off screen.  I can’t say I’m familiar with Kiarostami’s work; I don’t know if his double images are unique to this film or important in his overall body of work but they support the material, which is not so much about doubles but the multiple interpretations of what two people say.

We are like the tourists on Binoche and Shimell’s vacation.  We hear what they say and yet lack the greater context of their lives to truly understand.  The advantage we as an audience have is that unlike these tourists who exist as extras in the film, we get to follow these two people and hear the whole of what they say.  It is still not a fault of the picture that we are not given a blunt truth.  The film is a puzzle which cannot be solved, and when I saw the film for the first time I was so overjoyed to be actively participating in the story.  Depending on how I viewed the material, the story would change and satisfy me.  It also is very mysterious and good at dropping clues through dialogue and facial expression.  The flipside is that when we solve this puzzle, the second time around Certified Copy isn’t as absorbing.  We can view the early scenes and notice the subtle clues that support our theories.  I, for example, found great meaning in a quick line of dialogue by Binoche’s son which suggests much of the complicated dynamic between these three people.  To be honest the line is so quickly delivered and I don’t speak French and I missed it the first time.  But if films are meant to be viewed more than once then the lasting impact of Certified Copy will not live up to its reputation.  If I had written this right after I saw the film once, I would have talked only positively about it.  I didn’t know what to say then other than, ‘see it and interpret it for yourselves,’ and I hoped that I could elaborate on my own opinions about the movie itself with a second viewing.  Truth is I found it difficult to get into it in the same way.  Like a mystery film I kept examining the film for evidence and found the situation betrays itself.

I still admire it a great deal.  The digital photography is sublime, and Binoche is terrific.  I think many years down the line historians will make her out to be the greatest performer to ever appear in front of the camera.  It may sound like hyperbole but I really believe it.  The things this woman can do with her face are amazing.  She would have been fabulous in silent movies.  She’s also great at delivering lines, and without giving away my interpretation of the film the great material is the quarrels that this couple shares.   This is a terrific script.  It balances three different languages—English, French, and Italian—which Binoche can speak perfectly.  There is a great exchange between Binoche and the proprietress of a small café.  The proprietress assumes James is her husband, and the woman gives Binoche a reasonable speech about what husbands, even bad ones, give their wives.

I feel I must say a bit about how I saw the picture.  I sensed a great deal of hostility in Binoche’s voice early on towards James.  This is when I began to suspect things aren’t as they appear.  At first I was made uncomfortable by her forward, angry speech.  It is not at all how people behave to strangers and I felt embarrassed for her.  But James seems a willing listener.  Neither backs down on their beliefs and yet they never once put an end to their union.  I think something more is going on, something more complex than are they strangers or are they married, but a saving grace of the picture is its ambiguity.  It also makes it more of a puzzle, and it distracts somewhat from the generally brilliant experience it is to watch Binoche’s and Shimell’s performances.

Certified Copy (2010)

(a.k.a. Copie conforme)

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Writer: Abbas Kiarostami

Stars: Juliette Binoche and William Shimell

France

In French, English and Italian

Runtime: 106 minutes

Certified Copy is currently available On Demand from Comcast and other service providers.  It should be released on DVD by IFC in the near future.

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020773/

Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (2008)

A film about the great Andrei Tarkovsky faces many challenges.  The man’s work was so unique, so specific to the individual receiving it, that any interpretation of the man would be accused of discriminating against, say, my interpretation.  I don’t want to have to say this but in the context of the documentary Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky I feel that I must: I am not religious.  I was raised Catholic but religion, superstition, science-fiction, and magic hold equal value for me.  All are man-made concepts.  With this perspective I have still loved Tarkovsky’s films.

I think it fair to claim that director Dmitry Trakovsky finds great spirituality in Tarkovsky’s work.  Many others have too, but in claiming that Tarkovsky was a spiritual filmmaker and by reason a deeply religious man does not compute with how I have viewed Tarkovsky’s films.  He was an artist in search of acceptance in an increasingly dispassionate world that persecutes its free thinkers.  Though his movies require one’s full attention and indeed surrender, his art is very simple.  I used to think he was a complex artist, but the longer I’ve been familiar with his work the more I’ve understood that Tarkovsky asked questions and required no answers.  Answers are subjective and lead not to interpretation.  Religion is subjective; it is specific to a point of view and is not available for scrutiny.  If my assumption of Trakovsky is correct, then fine—let him make his film as he wants, but he is doing a great disservice to Tarkovsky’s reputation in context to how many view religion today here in the United States.  It’s become an ugly thing.  People get away with inflicting a great deal of pain, often violence, against others by hiding behind religion.  These people exist on the fringes, we are told, and yet are never contradicted by religious leaders.  Tarkovsky created out of humanity.  His characters, some religious, others maybe unaware of the concept, are seeking beauty and truth in art and humanity.  Often they are blinded with anger or rage or self-pity, but truth exists in an abstract form.  Truth in Tarkovsky, seldom if ever specified, is always metaphysical, not tangible.  It is never in the form of a cross.  Now, I may be confusing religion with spirituality but for me they are the same.  I felt that this documentary was made for those who love Tarkovsky and who are religious.  The two are not mutually exclusive.

This was my overwhelming reaction to the documentary, and I think it’s a valid argument.  I, someone for whom religion is non-existent, have been moved to stillness by Tarkovsky.  Andrei Rublev is spellbinding, an epic about the role of the artist figure during inhuman times.  Stalker gave me something that I think is fair to compare to a religious experience since film is my religion.  I was entranced, and if Stalker had continued for the rest of my life I would have lived a great and full existence.  Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky never allows for an agnostic or atheistic rendering of the director, and though the film doesn’t assault with religion, an all-around more broadened view would give a greater sense of the importance of this great 20^th Century artist.

The concept of the documentary is intriguing.  Director Dmitry Trakovsky tries to make sense of a quote from an artist with whom he is a kindred spirit: “Death does not exist.”  Trakovsky’s narration is a bit too academic.  It always feels as if the director is keeping his true reactions and emotions hidden, buried beneath creative metaphors.  It is college essay writing, but he hits on something very interesting in his introduction.  Trakovsky shows a couple of pictures of himself and his family from when they left Russia and came to the US.  Trakovsky was a cute kid, by the way, and this idea of searching for an artist with so much meaning in the researcher’s life is very relatable.  I myself am fascinated by the cinema of Pasolini, who actually comes up in this documentary.  His lifestyle and his way of cinema, a cinema akin to poetry, albeit a gritty, often ugly poetry, and his politics—as an Italian-American never having been to the birthplace of my parents, the notion of Pasolini is for me very romantic and palpable.  The concept of the film would seem to say less about Tarkovsky and more about Trakovsky, or at least Russia in the wake of Tarkovsky’s death.  And that would be a great documentary.  Instead, interview after interview is presented, some priceless, few others bewildering, and some of these accounts really stop the film.

I can appreciate actress Domiziana Giordano, the Botticellian beauty from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, even if her comments are vacuous and aimless.  She does recount something very interesting: he was a bit chauvinistic but being away from his family in Italy he adopted her as a daughter.  Better still is the interview with Andrei Andreevich Tarkovsky, the director’s son.  I was amazed that Trakovsky could locate the heir to this great director.  I sometimes forget that Tarkovsky existed in our time.  His work is so powerful it feels as if it came from an age before cinema.  Anyhow, Andrei, the son, was not allowed to leave the USSR when his parents decided to remain abroad.  The son reveals here that he was used by his government as a kind of bait to get the fugitive Tarkovsky back home.  The son defiantly says he will not return to Russia, and he now lives in Italy and France.  Though these accounts are great, 2/3 through the movie, Trakovsky himself comes to the realization that he has only been collecting inanimate testimonies.

Great documentaries document less and build impressions; it’s all the cinema can do.  Films give us a sense of life and cannot recreate it as the act of viewing a movie is a step removed from living.  Cinema is impressions; truth is aloof.  Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky fails in giving a real sense of who Tarkovsky was or what his contributions were to cinema or, in a greater context, to 20^th Century art and of his place in the great lineage of Russia’s artistic history and how the director has and will shape it.  Trakovsky interviewed too many subjects and presents too much of them.  This is why the film feels more like Trakovsky documenting.  Father Michael McCormick, an Orthodox monk living in California, is one subject too many.  His segment shuts down the film.  He mumbles about how Tarkovsky shaped his life in the church, but he comes off more as a film buff than a spiritual man.  I can understand the interest in a documentary about Tarkovsky to interview a monk but McCormick simply does not relate anything meaningful and, for that matter, cannot form a cohesive thought.

The film does open up in its final segments.  After traveling to Sweden to interview the great actor Erland Josephson, Trakovsky returns to his homeland, something Tarkovsky was never able to do.  Trakovsky speaks first with a Russian filmmaker who claims that filmmaking conditions haven’t changed much.  Many of those who worked with Tarkovsky are still active in the profession, another reminder that Tarkovsky lived not too long ago.  These scenes in Russia give a sense of what the director was after in his opening narration.  It brings full circle his idea but it’s a little too late.  The film feels like a work in progress.  I commend the director for focusing on a unique subject.  An American kid who closely identifies with Tarkovsky is a rarity given our popular culture, but the first hour really needs to be reworked.  It may have helped to see more of Tarkovsky’s images.  I am not familiar with documentary filmmaking but I am aware that claiming fair use isn’t as easy as it sounds, so maybe clips weren’t at the ready to really give a sense of the man’s cinema.  To be sure there are many excerpts, but in even these we don’t get a sense of Tarkovsky’s cinema.

The bottom line is this: will Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky entice unfamiliar viewers to Tarkovsky’s films?  I don’t think so.  It may be that the film is aiming for those who are already familiar, but because Tarkovsky is so powerful and oddly enough so accessible (I really do believe this—his movies aren’t as daunting as many have described) I think more could be done to showcase the director.  Dmitry Trakovsky has a worthy subject and some great material shot all over Europe and with a more intuitive, artful approach he may yet find a terrific film.  “Death does not exist” might refer to the fact that artists truly never die because their work exists for as long as it is appreciated.  Revolutions pass and time vanishes, but the art produced throughout the centuries is still with us.  Andrei Rublev is, in part, about this very topic, and if Trakovsky’s goal of the documentary was to also prove this point then he had succeeded, but the concept and execution seem too simple.  It’s obvious, and it might be why the film doesn’t linger in my mind they way Tarkovsky’s films do.  Still, Trakovsky should again be commended for what he set out to achieve.

Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (2008)

Director: Dmitry Trakovsky

Writer: Dmitry Trakovsky

Stars: Donatella Baglivo, Erland Josephson and Fabrizio Borin

USA

In English, Italian and Russian

Runtime: 89 minutes

Visit the film's official website to find theatrical showings all over the globe, as well as learn more about director Dmitry Trakovsky and his work, and purchase a copy of the DVD:

http://trakovskyfilm.com/

The film is also available on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Meeting-Andrei-Tarkovsky-Dmitry-Trakovsky/dp/B004FVLWQQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1303156572&sr=1-1

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1461246/

Disengagement (2007)

The problems of a nation are paralleled in one family.  Ana and Uli are step-siblings, reunited by the death of their father in France.  Ana has been raised as a Westerner by the New York born father, and Uli was adopted shortly after the father divorced his mother.  Uli was raised on the Gaza Strip.  In France, the siblings enjoy each other’s company.  We learn that, apparently, the father was not a very loving man.  He did not want Uli’s mother to move to Israel and had since lived his life apart from Uli.  Ana has no ties to her Jewish heritage.  Ana is a frivolous, flirtatious woman with no ties to anything, except an erotic, intense interest in her half-brother.  The death of their father reveals a secret long forgotten: Ana had a child at a Kibbutz many years ago and unbeknownst to all the father has spent a lot of time with the girl in Israel.  In order for Dana to receive her grandfather’s inheritance Ana must bring it to her herself.

For those unfamiliar with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Disengagement might be confusing.  I myself have only a superficial understanding of the conflict, but as I understand it after WWII when the allies were dividing up all of Nazi Germany’s conquered lands, it was seen fit to give the land of Israel to the Jewish people.  “A land without a people for a people without land” was the mission statement; only the Palestinians had been living in the Holy Land for centuries and were forced out in a global effort to atone for the misdeeds against all Jews in WWII.  It was an immoral decision, politics and religion aside, since millions of people who had committed no crimes were forced into an area at the edge of the country, and since then lives have been lost and hatred spews on the Gaza Strip.

One does not need an opinion as to which side is right.  In fact, neither and both are.  What Disengagement makes clear in scene after scene is that there are only losers in this conflict. 

When Ana arrives in Israel she is forbidden to enter the same Jeep as her brother.  This is the first in a small series of events that forces her to shed her thin skin.  Juliette Binoche, only the greatest living actress, plays Ana in a curious way.  The beginning scenes in France are too long.  Part of why they feel this way is that Binoche is almost unbearable to watch.  Her voice is so odd, shrill and high-pitched.  It’s clear her accent is more American that her normal speaking voice, but I think she and director Amos Gitaï made a very bad decision.  I said Ana is a frivolous woman but that is an understatement.  When we first meet her she is annoying, and Binoche is giving a bad performance.  I was shocked since she has been perfect in all the movies I’ve seen.  What Gitaï does is create a contrast, showing Ana before her introduction to the problems of the Middle East and after, having been involved in disengagement, the process of removing a group of people from their homes.  This contrast, however, is very short sighted.  Just because Ana is a Westerner doesn’t necessarily make her carefree and vapid.  Many Americans don’t have a clue as to the problems of Israel, but in all fairness the problems are too many to follow and people have lives and concerns of their own to deal with.  This character is more archetypal.  That doesn’t excuse the material.  It would have benefited from a more leveled depiction of a human being unfamiliar with these problems.

While I was disappointed in the first half hour of the film, once Ana and Uli, played by Liron Levo, arrive in Israel the film becomes terrific.  It is a political drama.  Not a thriller; director Gitaï carefully crafts an even playing field where every human being, Israeli and Palestinian, are decent, loving people.  Uli, we learn, is an officer for the Palestinian army, and Gaza is going through disengagement—all the Israelis are to be removed from their land.  No one can claim to hate the other side, and this is the stupidity Gitaï revels in pointing out.  The people respect each other.  The Palestinians soldiers are given sever orders to not injure the Israelis.  The Rabbi offers his love to Uli just before the gates are torn open and the soldiers perform their duties.  Stuck in the middle is Dana, Ana’s forgotten daughter.  An Israeli, everything she has in life, her garden, her students, will all be taken away from her.  Dana’s reunion with her mother is brilliantly staged.  Ana circles around the school playground.  She knows which teacher is her daughter, and Dana recognizes Ana from the photographs her grandfather showed her.  Dana touches her mother’s face and they hug.  Few words are shared, but because this situation is so understandable, the tears from both actresses are very well felt.

Unavoidable in any anti-war film is the view of the soldiers.  In a visual medium they suffer the most because we see them perform their duties even when, in the case of Disengagement, they hate what they have to do.  I wish there was a way to fix this problem.  There is a way, by depicting the ridiculous discussions of the politicians or rebels that decide the orders, but in an intimate film like this these scenes would distract from the material.  It’s a shame because Uli is a loveable person.  Liron Levo is a revelation here.  He is one of the few male actors alive that embodies humility and strength on the screen.  The finale reunites step brother and sister, just after Dana is lost in a van carrying out the Israeli civilians.  When once their friendship was so strong Ana detests the man in uniform before her.  He reassures her they will find Dana, but all Ana can scream is, “Leave me alone.”

One of the most heartbreaking images appears on the edges of the frame.  When a reading of the Torah is disrupted by Uli and the Palestinian soldiers, a Jewish worshiper, as he is being removed, hugs tightly the soldier forcing him out.  I was so struck by this image, so brilliantly on the fringes of the film, and it has so much meaning.

Disengagement (2007)

Director: Amos Gitaï

Writers: Amos Gitaï, Marie-Jose Sanselme

Stars: Juliette Binoche, Liron Levo and Jeanne Moreau

Israel / France

In Hebrew, English, French, Italian and Arabic

Runtime: 113 minutes

To purchase Disengagement visit Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Disengagement-liron-Levo/dp/B00455JE58/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1301206042&sr=1-1

IMDB link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0871512/