Certified Copy

We begin this film with an Italian book on display before a plain gray wall. The book is entitled Copia conforme, and its companions are an unmanned table, an unmanned microphone, a dirty chimney, and the aura of an imminent press conference. This is indeed what occurs. A man with some resemblance to this Italian-American director addresses us (we still cannot see the audience) in Italian about a British scholar with the plain name of James Miller, whose apparent tardiness "cannot be excused because of the traffic since his room is upstairs." Miller appears at last, to a small group, about forty people, most of whom are women. At this talk, conducted in English, Miller makes almost the same joke as his predecessor but says he "walked here." He also comments perfunctorily on the weather because Italians would expect no less of an Anglo-Saxon. Then he takes a swipe at the literary taste of his fellow Englishmen and we understand that his book, which won "best international essay of the year," has been a limited success. In fact, "limited success" may be the best caption for James Miller (William Shimell).

Suave-looking, if considerably more attractive from far than from up close, Miller quickly decides he has already lost his audience and begins luxuriating in pseudophilosophical mumbo-jumbo ("It is difficult to write about art: there are no fixed points of reference, there are no immutable truths"). As he is about to deliver a prepared statement in Italian thanking Marco Lenzi – the man who introduced him and translated his book – a woman comes and sits in one of the two front row seats marked riservato (Lenzi took the first one), and is shot a look by Lenzi that acknowledges the decorum of such an act. We do not know this at the time, but this may be the film's most important moment since it safely excludes one interpretation that the plot will come to suggest. Soon thereafter a young boy of maybe twelve enters the room and begins to bug the woman (Juliette Binoche), who is very obviously his mother. The boy will spend a long time looking over at his mother, who jokes with Lenzi and pendulates from subrisive attention to Miller to fiddling with her handbag in that unique way a woman has of signaling her boredom. 

In the meantime, Miller drones on about "the authenticity of art" (a tired modern topos): he mentions the origin of the word 'origin' (the Latin orīrī, 'to arise, be born'); compares our art productions to us since we are "DNA replicas of our forebears"; and underscores that certifying the authenticity of the work of great artists in all epochs and disciplines has become a most important vocation – and I think you get the idea. But when our pontificating expert lists the four criteria by which a work of art can be certified, the woman is beckoned to leave the room by her son, which she does, all the while looking back in mocking amusement at our speaker. In a marvelous twist, Miller has only listed two criteria ("the form and shape of the artefact"; "the material of which it is made") when the presentation is interrupted by a cell phone's ring – Miller's phone – that he actually answers. We shift scenes and see the woman outside in the Tuscan streets walking several yards in front of her son, who barely looks up from his handheld game console. They sit down for a cheeseburger and the son, still not looking up, asks her casually how many of Miller's books she bought. "Six," she replies, as if the number held some significance. The interrogation continues in that vein that drives teenagers crazy, to wit, when they know that their parents are hiding something from them and won't divulge it – precisely what teenagers do all day to their parents, but anyway. The woman states she will give a copy to a friend, her son protests that the friend already has it, and she mentions an "autographed copy" (exemplaire dédicacé) as her aim. Then the son knows that she simply wants to see the fellow again and calls her on it. She does not deny the charge, and we have our plot.

With Lanzi's help Miller visits the woman in her underground store, very much a Roman catacomb replete with busts and other antiques. Something bothers him about this place – perhaps simply that it so resembles a crypt – so he spurns her repeated offer to remain there and ejects both of them into "the fresh air." "Your invitation," he reminds her, "said nothing about an antiques shop." She is visibly upset by this whole sequence, strangely reminiscent of a man's failed attempt to keep a desired woman in what he believes is his irresistible bachelor pad, but which to her seems very much like a trap. They then set off on one of those surreal drives so popular in the work of some directors (Kiarostami is no exception) where certain peculiar aspects of the two interlocutors will be revealed. From this first isolated exchange we can deduce one thing (a few other things will be deduced later on): the woman, who is never named, is not trying to impress Miller by allowing him to prattle on about aesthetics; she is trying to become his muse. Every time he speaks abstractly, she slips him a concrete example, usually something simpler and more grounded. She accuses him of trying to prove the unprovable not to nettle him but to see whether he might indeed listen and come down to earth next to her. Of course, he rebuts such accusations soundly and consistently. "I'm afraid," he says with the tone of an emergency room surgeon breaking some bad news, "there's nothing very simple about being simple." This implies that it is harder for someone of impeccable taste to debase himself with everyday culture than for someone ensconced in that same mundane rubbish to be elevated towards the sublime, an argument in favor of art's transformative power upon the human soul. Miller then promises her his favorite joke, whose punchline about a soda bottle she guesses and which, anyway, is so insipid we truly hope that his calling it his "favorite joke" was the real attempt at humor (his sour reaction suggests it wasn't). They arrive in a small town renowned for weddings, young couples, and a painting that was once thought to date to Roman times then exposed fifty years ago as an eighteenth-century forgery, and somehow we sense that although Miller has a train at nine that night, we will not be leaving that small town any time soon.

It is here as well that the film begins to hint at another plot, at the resemblance of this nameless woman's son to this bleary-eyed Englishman, at the consequences of raising a family, at the omission of the son's surname in the dedication of that autographed tome. Is the son a "certified copy" of the father? Are we witnessing a long-suffering married couple fallen out of love? The indentured servitude to a one-night-stand that bequeathed a child? Two people having fun while playing fantasy roles that have no kinship with their realities? The rest of the film predicates this unusual indeterminacy, yet the first fifteen minutes of Certified Copy ensure only one plausible explanation to its subsequent events, which will not be revealed here. Suffice it to say that those who love ambiguity may love this film, even if there is no real ambiguity at all – that is, unless the characters are asylum-ripe. The broad boilerplate notions of art are belied by the petty, private hell, or facsimile of a petty, private hell, unleashed by its second half, which, we suppose, is meant to show how little aesthetic theory has to do with life or art. Many internet sources indicate some professional actors were considered for the role of Miller (Shimell is no stranger to the limelight being a well-known opera singer, but is not a trained actor), which would have made the whole affair incredibly pretentious and melodramatic. As it is, the balance is perfect: Binoche, who flutters among English, French, and Italian at a hummingbird's pace, maintains her mildly histrionic posturings; whereas Shimell must simply find a way to handle them without the ease of someone long accustomed to disguise. The result is that we come to think that the woman is not being truthful and that Miller, for all his ridiculous aphorisms (the most quoted will surely be from a "Persian poem" he supposedly happens to know), may be the victim of a harridan's whims. Towards the dead center of the film, a supporting character detects that husband and wife are indeed seated in her café and offers some well-meant advice about what makes a man tick ("Men need work: it distracts them and we can lead our lives"; "It can't be all that bad if your only complaint is that your husband works too much"; "When there's no other woman we begin to see work as our rival") and we believe her because old women, especially old women in movies, tend to be conduits of the truth. And what about what happened five years ago near the replica of a famous statue? After all, without that revelation in Florence, there would have been no original to copy.

La Cérémonie

We will leave an explanation of this film's title to the curious who believe that the Internet could not possibly lie to them. Its translation may indeed shed some light on the plot – that is, if you like your plots brightly lit – yet the English novel on which the film is based is called A Judgement in Stone. And while most movie versions employ a literal translation of the French, German has chosen "Beasts," and Italian, "The Darkness in the Mind." What kind of film could possibly inspire such diverse nomenclature? One most certainly of beasts and judgements, although these labels hang loosely to more than a few objects. And the country home that serves as the centerpiece of our action has more than a few objects to go around. 

Our protagonist is a morose, tomboyish, yet attractive housekeeper with a name out of a socialist realist novel, Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire). When we first see her, she is somewhat late to an appointment with the debonair and rather stunning Catherine Lelièvre (an equally stunning Jacqueline Bisset) at a café that admittedly makes Catherine nervous. Why should a woman of the world, a former model (we are informed later by a dubious source), and a member of the upper crust of society, feel ill at ease in a mediocre little bistro, the likes of which litter France as pigeons occupy Rome? Better to let the events speak for themselves. Catherine warns Sophie – although the warning is like much of Catherine's persona, wholly disingenuous – that the house is remote. "Is that a problem?" she asks, also not caring whether it is. "I don't know," replies Sophie, an answer that startles Catherine. Throughout the film Sophie will recur to this slogan of her ignorance, and on numerous occasions Catherine will be startled either because Sophie should obviously know or because her indifference to that knowledge comes off as terrifying. Catherine's clear, lightly-accented French hints at a privileged life spend abroad in foreign tongues, perhaps indeed very privileged. Alas, she has had little success with domestics of late (such is the curse of the wealthy unable to procure the perfect assistant) and Sophie was laid off after her employer's husband died suddenly. "She's moving to Australia to be with her son," she tells Catherine, who couldn't care less what happens to the former employer provided the reference is solid. Sophie presents her letter of recommendation, but does so in a manner that will strike the careful viewer as unusual. We cannot see Catherine's face at that very moment, so it is impossible to detect whether the same sensation creeps over her features, but the way Sophie points to the name and address on the top of the letter makes us uncomfortable. The two ladies hit it off as much as they can given that they are negotiating the blandest of business deals, Sophie agitatedly mentions her previous salary, Catherine catches on and hikes it by ten percent, and all of a sudden there is nothing more to talk about. For her first day of work, Sophie's employer will fetch her at nine on Tuesday from the local train station. And what day is it today, asks the employee. Saturday, says a startled Mrs. Lelièvre, who doesn't really notice anything wrong although she very well should.  

This scene, one of the very best opening vignettes you will ever see, foreshadows every detail to come. We may even generously interpret Sophie's listless looks over Catherine's shoulder as symbolizing her gaze at another character, one who hasn't been mentioned but who figures prominently in our story, and one who can also be symbolized by a letter since her work comprises the handling of others' written correspondence. That remarkable shrew is the local postmistress Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert). For my money, Huppert and Emily Watson are the world's two most talented actresses, but let us not digress. Catherine returns to her remote manor for a family dinner of moules-frites, without, it appears, the frites. The reactions towards Sophie's hiring are mixed: her recently teen son Gilles (Valentin Merlet) inquires as to her looks (Catherine, of course, "did not notice" anything except that "she wasn't awful"); her nineteen-year-old stepdaughter Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) wonders as many educated young people do about the wages and conditions of their imminent housekeeper; and her greybeard husband Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel) just wants to eat his mussels, listen to Mozart, and hope it all works out for the best. One may consider this blended quartet a microcosm of upper-class interests – money and labor negotiations, hedonism, overidentification with the less fortunate owing, it is assumed, to guilt, and a Pollyanna-like aversion to conflict coupled with a longing for higher culture – or one may not. Since the confrontations that will arise pit the well-off against those who perform services for the selfsame elite, the most facile of readings will have something to do with the proletariat – but now we must really put a stop to this silliness and return to that train station.   

Somehow we know that when the nine o'clock Tuesday morning train arrives, Sophie won't be on it. We are so sure of this, in fact, that we search for the same intuition in Catherine, who seems to know it as well, although she cannot quite fathom why. Since we are still in that tenebrous age before cell phones, our brooding employer takes out a cigarette and puffs away furiously – that is, until she espies Sophie on the other side of the platform. Sophie, who is wearing exactly what she wore to the bistro, has taken an earlier train with the explanation that she did not want to be late, which may ultimately rank as the most plausible of her countless lies in La Cérémonie. As the two approach Catherine's car, they are accosted by Jeanne looking for a ride to work, and we should say something about this Jeanne. In and around town Jeanne Marcal is known for four things: her gaudy, Pippi Longstocking-like wardrobe; her snooping (in her profession that means rendering unto mail recipients what Caesar's taster used to render unto Caesar); her volunteering for the Church, although she has no evident spirituality and simply desires to help the poor; and her past tragedy, as she once upon a time was acquitted for the negligent death of her small daughter. The description of this dreadful event that she confesses to Sophie omits so much detail as to make us wonder what, if anything, she ever says is true. Everything she utters, be it whimsical, cruel, or objectively intelligent, is punctuated by the same myopic smile. Yet somehow we believe, if for but a moment, that it was society not Jeanne who killed her daughter. Society who made her an outcast and a single mother; society who let her dwell in a tiny apartment with an exposed oven; society that rushed to damn her before she could even muster a defense. Thus ten minutes into our film, we have been sufficiently introduced to the three female leads, all seated in one car and revving off in the same and yet very different directions. When Jeanne smiles at Sophie with that myopic smile, the latter looks perplexed as to why anyone would smile at her. Later, towards the middle of the film, Sophie will finally return the smile and our story assumes a very different tenor.

There is a poorly-kept secret in La Cérémonie that outrattles the other, less consequential skeletons surfacing one after another like zombies. The scene in which the truth is 'revealed' (any half-awake viewer would have reached the same conclusion well before this point) seems overwrought and melodramatic, but the grief and anger that ooze out foretell the wickedness of the tale's end. In more than one scene we see despair, white-man-in-China despair, an abyss of hopelessness that gapes like a leviathan. The secret soon becomes the justification for all of Sophie's passive-aggressive charades, although it should be said that her personality is so damaged to begin with that no excuse will suffice. I have said less about Jeanne, a creature from a very black lagoon, because what is said about her in the film is so clear yet so terrifying that we shudder to consider the fact that we probably all know people just like her. Cheeky, impish, prying, cheerfully mischievous in an effort to mask true malevolence, intelligent in that way unique to very smart people who have come to envy life and all its inhabitants, Jeanne skips around, gleefully pinching fruit from a vendor like some insolent street urchin. We find her so frightening precisely because she is mindfully incalculable. And what about Sophie? In one respect Sophie embodies the plight of the typical domestic servant, who may be likened in this instance to a piece of furniture: something you acquire, place in a comfortable spot, and only notice ever again when you start tripping over it. As for the darkness and the ceremony, well, we would probably be better off just going and helping the poor. Just like Jeanne.

Monsieur Hire

There is a wonderful scene in this film where everyone gathers around the titular character's fallen body on an ice rink, producing concentric circles of onlookers that spread like the pool of blood beneath him. Even without any context, the image reminds the viewer of a bull's eye, which Monsieur Hire (a squeakily pronounced "ear") certainly has on his narrow, uncaressed back. Hire (Michel Blanc) is a tailor by profession, one whose sartorial manias carry over into the layout of his apartment and his fascination with things he cannot have. Single, sexually ambiguous, and very shy, Hire has spent many years (we are never told quite how many) being stared at, pelted with random materials, and generally feared. "Why do you think people are afraid of you?" asks Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire), the young woman who lives across the way and becomes the epicenter of her creepy neighbor's life. The tailor does not know how to answer this question and brushes it off with a platitude, but we know that fear can only come from ignorance. Mediocrity and nondescriptness are the hallmarks of a functioning society; it has no room for freaks or eccentrics, both of which might be used to describe this small man getting on forty, always dressed in black, always dressed impeccably. Why would anyone put so much effort into his outward appearance when he knows that no one will ever compliment him on it? Surely there exist scruffy tailors who fashion quality products, so it cannot only be for professional reasons. "You have no idea how much I've suffered," he says to Alice, who concurs but does not indulge Hire by asking further questions.

Hire, we are told, is short for Hirovitch. In the 1933 original by the Belgian master of detective novels, Hire is a Jew, the classic outsider amidst France's impassioned Catholic throngs. When the book was adapted into this film shortly after the Second World War, it was thankfully no longer possible to dwell on such ethnic stereotypes, and the person was transformed into the opposite – a potential collaborator. Strangely, Blanc's Hire has elements of each side, at once the pariah whose ostracization from society is primarily imputable to his neurotic neatness, lack of confidence and sociability, and his feeling that it is much easier to hide in one's apartment and observe his pet mice than try to make friends in the world. On the other hand, we perceive that Hire is plagued by the worst of conditions: a bad conscience. Some vile act follows him on his daily errands, stands by him as he gazes out his window and into Alice's uncurtained quarters, prevents him from striking his teenage tormentors as they defile him verbally and sometimes even physically. We are then not surprised when Hire is approached by a smarmy police inspector (André Wilms) investigating an awful crime committed not far from the modest Parisian quarter which Hire never seems to leave. Yes, thinks the intuitive demotic mind, Hire would be just the type of person to commit such a crime. After all, outcasts naturally loathe the laws of the societies that do not accept them. Yet the inspector has another reason for visiting Hire: he is just as much the type of person who would notice the slightest disturbance in the neighborhood's locomotion. 

A handful of other details is provided. Hire is a peerless bowler ("the one place where I am not feared," he boasts to the inspector), a regular trick at the local brothels, enamored with one dramatic piano quartet  (written by this composer when he was only twenty-two), and obsessed with watching Alice do everything women in their early twenties do, even with her boyfriend. Hire's voyeurism proceeds unimpeded very much like a silent film, with a booming soundtrack and his strong, almost hysterical expressions occupying the frame of a dark and distant window. Then, in one very curious passage, he tells Alice about an elderly lady who would accost some of Paris's infamous pigeon population and try to feed them. This was, he notes, her main activity, although she wasn't actually giving them food but poison. Why would Hire bother recalling this drab detail considering the slippery slope that he already seems to have transgressed? And why doesn't he finish telling his story? Despite director Patrice Leconte's half-hearted attempt to emphasize Alice's role (the original novel is entitled The engagement of Monsieur Hire), Blanc absorbs all of our interest, expressing the pettiest of concerns with great gusto and all serious emotions with nary a twitch. Alice is a simple country girl who has only been in Paris a few months, but she decides that she could love an outcast. What she doesn't see is that being apart from society is what makes Hire begin each miserable day: he is not so much above it as beside it, watching everyone move, live, and breathe with the exception of himself. Entering society would deprive him of this distinction and he would become just like everyone else. And that is, mind you, absolutely the last thing he would ever do.          

Baudelaire, "Semper eadem"

A work ("Ever the same") by this French poet.  You can read the original here. 

"Whence," did you ask, "derives this sadness strange,
In tides sea-like upon the bare black rock?"
Yet once our heart has reaped its harvest plain,
To live is woe. All guard this secret's lock:

A simple, not mysterious pain has come,
And, like your joy, all dazzles in release.
So quit your search, O comely, curious one!
And though of softest voice, so hold your peace!

O foolish one! O ever-happy soul!
Your mouth of childish laughs!  Than Life even more,
'Tis Death which binds us by the subtlest beams.

Leave my heart drunk upon a masquerade,
In your eyes plung'd, as in the finest dream,
Adoze for long beneath your brows' dim shade!

Verlaine, "Ô triste, triste était mon âme"

One of this poet's most famous poems ("O sad, so sad my soul").  You can read the original here.

O sad, so sad my soul,                                   
Because a woman, a woman stole.

My mind I cannot allay,
Although my heart is far away.

Although my heart, although my soul,              
Are far from her control.

My mind I cannot allay,
Although my heart is far away.

And my heart, so black and blue,                
Says to my soul: Can this be true?

Can this be true, could this be true?
This pride anew, this grief anew?

And my soul says to my heart: Lo!
What traps fate brings, I do not know.

At once in love and grief to sway,
Although we both are far away.