The Omen

One may wonder what would possess a director to remake a film scene-for-scene if that film did not have some kind of artistic appeal. The reasoning behind such a premise is woefully simple: only art can be re-enjoyed. The crash-bang-blow-up vehicles that continue to diminish our attention span draw the numbers they are supposed to attract then quietly subside, forever relegated to oblivion or lost amongst hundreds of clones. But art, true art, cannot be remade, although its sensation can indeed be reproduced. As opposed to the latest screen version of this controversial novel, Kubrick's opuscule was not so much an adaptation as a slender louver to a majestic gallery from which readers of the novel could discern little of the original (praise for the movie has in fact been scattershot, with some critics invariably convinced that older, plainer, and pruder is always the way to go). Yet despite its moral shortcomings, Lolita is still an artistic masterpiece with the fatal flaw of trying to sublimate pornography, a mistake that might be the caption for the entire twentieth century. Other good to great literary works have enjoyed intermittent revival because what lies at their heart – be it a moral lesson, an artistic vision, or something infinitely tragic and infinitely beautiful – is worth repeating and remembering. And while we gladly indulge ourselves in sweet memories when given the opportunity, sometimes it is important to recall other, darker materials within our world. And nothing is more powerful than mantic mysteries in engendering fear and trembling. So do we step and behold this remake released ten years ago today.

We are taken into the family of thirtysomething Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber), a tall, handsome, and successful American diplomat posted in Italy. He is there with his wife Katherine (Julia Stiles), ten years his junior and, as the film begins, pregnant with their first child. Even being unaware of the film's poorly kept secret, we understand that horror movies that commence with a birth will necessarily involve a terrible fate for all present, and the Thorns' predicament proves to be no exception. Mere moments after he is supposed to be basking in the bliss of fatherhood, Thorn is approached by the hospital's Catholic priest, Father Spiletto, who regrets to inform him that his son did not make it out the womb alive. Yet a solution exists: Spiletto mentions a child whose mother did not survive his birth, and with a few smooth words about placating Katherine's desire to have a baby, the changeling is retrieved and bestowed. What is very curious about this revolting moral decision is Thorn's indifference to the origin of the baby's mother – admittedly, out of desperation not snobbery. One would think that given science's insistence on genetic disorders, tendencies, and determination, an educated modern man would be loath to accept a fatherless child in a foreign maternity ward. But this twist has nothing to do with Thorn's noble intentions. The conceit is clearly designed as a choice: Thorn elects to bring the child he will call Damien into his home and in so doing, seals the destiny of all parties involved. Katherine is happy, he no longer has a spouse to comfort, and he can turn his attention back to what interests him most, namely his career.

Damien ages and nothing seems awry; we see the blissful trio doing blissful family things, giggling warmly all the while. By the time his son is five, Robert has been appointed Deputy Chief of Mission to the American Embassy in London, a rather fantastic feat for so young a diplomat. But then again, perhaps he's had some help along the way – and more help is coming. At precisely 6:06:06 am, the Ambassador perishes in a freak road accident with an oil tanker, leaving Thorn, still in his thirties, as the "youngest Ambassador in American history." A large estate outside of London awaits the Thorns who decide on a gala celebration of Damien's fifth birthday. Now about this Damien character. As I child I was always lectured about how horrible it was to expose underage actors to the trauma and nightmarish scenes so commonly incident to films involving evil, human or superhuman. Evidence for this edict is tremendous: so many young actors, having run and screamed from phantom killers their whole childhood, turn to drugs and other insidious outlets and end up ruining their lives in toto. Who knows what will befall Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick; one hopes his fate will be kinder than that of so many of his predecessors. In any case, the lad is convincing in his irreverence towards the rules of the adult world. When his nanny commits suicide in his name at said gala event, he is neither as proud as a devil nor as scared as a child. No, this little beast couldn't care less about what happens to this nanny, as he is duly aware of the coming of another, the malefic Mrs. Baylock (Mia Farrow).

There are other odds and ends: a photographer (David Thewlis) whose work contains hints of how his subjects might meet their maker; a barbiturate-addled priest (Pete Postlethwaite) who chants weird verse of impending doom and claims to have seen Damien's birth mother; and the scholar Bugenhagen (Michael Gambon) who knows something about killing a demon. A few amendments to the original script are made – mostly, as it were, visual inserts – such as a series of nightmares that plague Thorn (one involves the slow closing of a bathroom cabinet mirror; I will leave it at that) and an allusion to the cowled figure in this film previously reviewed here. What ultimately takes place is far less surprising than the sidelights into what may have spawned this diabolical situation: the topical allusions at the film's beginning to recent natural and manmade disasters; calling upon Father Spiletto, who has survived a mysterious fire in the hospital that cost him his speech and half his face, in a lazaretto; the graveyard that Spiletto indicates the photographer and Thorn might want to visit (there is also a subsequent dream sequence with a hideously animate Spiletto cackling in a way that will hurt your sleep); and the identity of Damien's biological mother. The photographer and priest provide a sturdy contrast of what cannot be denied owing to photographic evidence and what cannot be empirically ascertained, because faith inherently means there is no ocular proof. It is this coin that the Thorns decide to flip, with unfortunately no winning scenario on either side. If the Thorns are a shade too young (Gregory Peck and Lee Remick were each substantially older than their counterparts in the original) it is both to appeal to a more adolescent crowd and underscore that meteoric rises might be owed to other shooting stars. Or other light bearers.

Nostalghia

If you were to ask someone of nationalistic bent about the most untranslatable concepts in his mother tongue, he would invariably include a word or short phrase that denotes homesickness (or the much lovelier German analogue, Heimweh, 'home-woe,' of which nostalgia is said to be a calque). He would grudgingly admit that while homesickness is the closest English term, the two words actually lie very far apart. "You cannot really render it as aching for home," he might say, "it is more the yearning to breathe the air in the manner of its natives, air that exists nowhere else." The truth is that nostalgia has expanded its breadth of meaning: now it conveys as much a feeling of missing home as a glorification of the past in the sacrifice of the present and, often enough, of the future – a future that drifts ever further away from those golden years. I have had many instances in my life in which I felt wonderful events, times, and friends could never be repeated, and I was dreadfully right. They cannot and we cannot. What we have in their stead is the sensation of loss and the hope that redemption will allow us to enjoy those moments for eternity. And that is why the preservation of the human soul is the most vital function of culture. I do not for a minute believe that those who worship money and fossils and the materiality of this green globe can ever feel nostalgia: it is, with true love and true art, the deepest of sensations, and it is far beyond their ken as beasts of the moment. Nostalgia for the innocence of one's childhood, of love's labors lost, of the sweetness of things, of books, languages, sunsets, summer evenings of unstinting passion, the headiness of wine and the eternal mystery of our soul's whims – all this makes for an exquisite banquet of memories. It may also make, in the event of proper sidereal alignment, a first-rate Romantic poet. Which brings us to this remarkable film.

We begin with an Italian countryside, something not terribly evolved from what you might find in this animal-slaughtering favorite, a green and brown realm of plain rusticity. At the conspicuous center of our landscape stands a tree, Tarkovsky's eternal hope for the world; to the right and somewhat above the treetop, a power line in the shape of the greatest symbol we have ever known; in the background hills or mountains swimming amidst the mist. Slowly a small European car puffs its way left, the Italian sinistro, and stops before a garden leading up one of these misty hillocks, and a young, voluptuous redhead emerges, her hair in endless knots, first speaking Russian then Italian. As she climbs up the hill through a wondrous garden, the man mutters under his breath that he "can't go on." But he does. He follows her, onward and upward, to a chapel to gaze at a fresco by this famed artist. There our redhead, an Italian by the name of Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), does not ask the chapel curator, likely a priest himself, why women flock to see the Madonna del Parto – that question is very obvious, and would belong in a lesser film. No, Eugenia well understands the despair of a woman who cannot bear children, or a mother whose daughter cannot bear a grandchild. What she wants to know is why they pray in the way they do, so fervently silent, then in a chant that culminates in a release of a bellyful of sparrows from the Madonna's statue. "Why are women more pious than men?" she asks, not incorrectly. The man pontificates a conservative view of women's role – to birth and raise children with patience and sacrifice – and as she walks away in half-feigned disgust, he adds: "You probably just want to be happy, but there is something in life more important than that." Eugenia stops and returns her eyes to all the mothers gathered, all praying to the one Mother, all beseeching that one of their daughters may bear children, a request punctuated by the opening of the belly. She does not look on transfixed, but simply curious. She is curious about her motherhood, about ritual, about all things that get lost in modernity's fire of independence and self-assertion. And suddenly she knows what word is more important in life than happiness.

The Italian for that word, fede, is not known to her companion, the poet Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), so she translates it for him as vera (вера). She does not, however, convey the information with any solemnity, but with a snicker, and for good reason: fede means both faith and a wedding band, and Eugenia's mind is definitely much more focused on the latter. They converse in Italian (his insistence) even though it seems evident Eugenia's Russian would be more useful; then we consider that Italian may be the one trump card she holds over Gorchakov's Russian wife in Moscow. Indeed, her red hair, her role as his guide to the 'overworld,' and her painful sexual intrigue all denote temptation of the sinister kind and could have led – again, in a far lesser film – to carnal exploration. Yet somehow we know that this will never occur. In one vignette the camera – and, in turn, we and Gorchakov – notice Eugenia's pneumatic curves for what seems like the first time. His sudden compliment that she is so beautiful simply filters a hormonal reaction, and there is often something about very pure and sacrosanct places that shunts minds onto different tracks. Her expression for a few seconds thereafter communicates every ounce of her desire, the entire timeline of her pleasure at the compliment, her arousal, her disappointment when his eyes still do not meet hers, her arousal again, and finally her resignation that even if he did mean it, his comment was probably not enough for them to sleep together. Gorchakov, a melancholy and fatigued creature, has earned this disappointment: he has come to Italy to comprehend why Pavel Sosnovsky, a late eighteenth-century Russian composer, forsook the hills of Rome and a blossoming career to return to Russia and his status as a serf. Some say Sosnovsky loved a Russian serf girl, but some always say that. Others merely aver that he missed his homeland and would rather die enslaved in his native element than live on in exile – one of the most common interpretations of voluntary exile in modern thought. Ostensibly a well-known poet, Gorchakov exhibits more interest in the sadness of the locales he visits – chapels, churches, villages, and finally, these baths – than in any scholarly pursuits. He has not come to discover Sosnovsky's motives, he has come to find his own. His silly joke in Russian to a little Italian girl who could not possibly understand him is one of Nostalghia's iconic passages, in no small part owing to the resonance it receives in its closing shots. Yet at the time it smacks of cavalierness and frivolity, not nearly as sad as later events reveal it to be. Which can also be said about the third tragic figure in our triptych, the eccentric mathematician Domenico (a marvelous Erland Josephson).

It is probably best not to divulge too much about Domenico's backstory, which explains why apart from his outstanding mind and his German shepherd he is very much alone in the world. I stand corrected, there is a third companion: his fede, which is so strong as to augment at once his mathematical reasoning and his emotional pitch. The world simply does not add up. One drop of olive oil (in another much-discussed scene) and another drop of olive oil do not equal two drops, but one bigger drop. What we can say is that as we have three characters, so too do we have three dreams. First, there is Sosnovsky's, recounted in a letter (in Italian) as to why he needs to return to his birthplace. Sosnovsky was supposed to write an opera for his lord, and there were statues in the park where the opera was to be performed. As he approached the park he became one of the statues, and instinctively he knew that if he moved he would be severely punished. Thus, for a moment or a little longer, he actually turned to stone, powerless, and then realized that this was no dream at all, but his own bitter life. And he also realized that he could not forsake Russia, and the thought of not seeing its birches or languishing in the scents of his childhood grew intolerable. Then there is Eugenia's dream, narrated to her Russian guest during a long monologue of frustration when it becomes clear that her desires will not be reciprocated. I need not describe it in detail; suffice it to say that it involves a worm in her hair that escapes under her wardrobe – the context suggests that she has already provided her dream with sufficient analysis. And then there is Gorchakov's dream, the dream he endures after he tells that little girl that little joke about rescuing someone from a pond. And what does he see in his dream? He sees himself as himself; he sees himself as Domenico; he sees churches and streets that were never his but somehow should have been; and he weighs the criteria on which we, consciously and unconsciously, base our notion of what is home. Many claim that for a poet home is his language, the world in which the gilded filaments of his conscience and intelligence fuse into the most sublime and elevated of human expression. So what does this have to do with birthplace or childhood? Haven't countless poets composed countless odes thousands of miles away from their natal fields? They most certainly have. But maybe it is better to ask whether those odes would have been written if those poets and fields had never parted.      

The Talented Mr. Ripley (novel)

Every morning he watched the sun, from his bedroom window, rising through the winter mists, struggling upward over the peaceful-looking city, breaking through finally to give a couple of hours of actual sunshine before noon, and the quiet beginning of each day was like a promise of peace in the future. The days were growing warmer. There was more light, and less rain. Spring was almost here, and one of these mornings, one morning finer than these, he would leave the house and board a ship for Greece.

You may never have considered how you evaluate characters in a work of fiction, but you certainly pass some kind of judgment. For the dreamers among us, there will be a direct correlation between the fictional and real worlds whereby the problems and solutions of one will be transposed into the other. The way in which a character manages his morals should allow you to deselect some of those vapid adventures where "everything is possible" because as one critic noted in a different context, if anything goes then nothing can be funny. How very true. The same can be said of any film or book praised by the irresponsible among us for being "immoral" or "amoral," with some preferring the latter because it seems to involve love. What they are really saying is that they feel repressed by the status quo or normal, good, basic values and this work grants them a fantastic outlet. There is nothing terribly wrong with such a desire provided this outlet is superior to other outlets, which I fear smacks of old-fashioned Victorian dos and don'ts. Good that such simplistic classifications don't really bother the eponymous character of this novel.

Our hero, if that is truly the right word, is first depicted as prey, a role he will come to relish. Whatever we learn of Thomas Ripley in the pages that follow, his innate ability for subterfuge and skulduggery should not be disesteemed. He is tailed into a bar by what turns out to be fortune itself: Herbert Greenleaf, the father of someone he does not know very well has tracked Ripley down as a potential conduit to his self-exiled progeny – if painting and sunbathing in Italy qualify as exile. Words are exchanged that afford the reader far greater insight into Ripley's motives than Greenleaf could ever dream of contemplating and a deal is struck: Ripley is to travel to Europe on Greenleaf's money – the name choice is now painfully clear – to track down Dickie Greenleaf with the aim of homeward persuasion. An odd job for an odd fellow:

A cap was the most versatile of head-gears, he thought, and he wondered why he had never thought of wearing one before? He could look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom amused himself with it in his room in front of the mirror. He had always thought he had the world's dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist's face, he thought. The cap changed all that. It gave him a country air, Greenwich, Connecticut, country. Now he was a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps. He bought a pipe to go with the cap.

No other paragraph in The Talented Mr. Ripley more aptly describes its protagonist. So you will not be overmuch surprised to learn what "the world's dullest face" can do when cornered. And cornered he will be when he comes upon Dickie Greenleaf and the nominal woman in his life, Margaret Sherwood.

Margaret, dite Marge, has all the trappings of a standard issue 1950s American sweetheart. Her only added twist are her two distinct ambitions: publishing her book on photography and marrying Dickie Greenleaf. Dickie is indifferent to both these pursuits, but perhaps because his intellect only allows him to remain on the surface of things, be those things emotions, languages, or human psychology. A nice, unintelligent, conventionally handsome fellow of absolutely no talent; and yet Tom never considers that he would have become much like Dickie Greenleaf had he fed from the same silver spoon. The life of the young couple, apparently not yet lovers in the modern sense of the word, is invaded until Tom makes a fateful decision that involves murdering and replacing an indifferent, third-rate painter whose father is patiently awaiting his return stateside. This is done in a boat in San Remo and will foreshadow another murder involving a car at another Italian location, and the plot has all the petrol it will need for a long and high-speed journey. Tom usurps what he wants of Dickie's existence – primarily, the insouciance and principles of easy living – and does not consider the consequences in their dreadful entirety. He learns Italian by studying it with diligence and interest, and continues relentlessly in his attempts to lead a placid post-War life. But he encounters more than a few obstacles: Marge's inquiries, a porcine boor by the name of Freddie Miles, and a platoon of Italian law enforcement officers who resemble each other just as much as Tom looks like Dickie (Tom is actually interviewed in both identities by the same policeman). These omnipresent coppers come off more than once as disturbingly incompetent, an impression unchanged by Herbert Greenleaf's hiring of an American gumshoe to find his vanished son.   

While refraining from acerbic asides, Highsmith directs her genius to the smallest of details with a precision seldom found in modern belles lettres ("They were interrupted for a minute while Mr. Greenleaf saw that they were all seated"; "He stopped in front of an antique shop window and stared for several minutes at a gloomy oil painting of two bearded saints descending a dark hill in moonlight"; "The Via Appica stretched out before him, grey and ancient in the soft lights of its infrequent lamps"). The result is compelling in the same way that all artistic, thoughtful enterprises are compelling: they modulate our own definition of what art is. Ripley may be a sociopath, but the methods with which he hoodwinks and dispatches nuisances (you will never forget the scene with the shoe) speak of a great mind exercising his cerebral precedence over human mediocrity. The tale has been told in many different formats but almost invariably with an amount of disgust for the peon, the ignorant and the uncultured citizen who would never in a thousand moons be able to figure out the machinations of a certain Thomas Ripley. To her credit Highsmith does not pander to this facile conceit, one that is particularly disdained by oversensitive critics who think the author might have in mind these selfsame critics. We end up rooting for Ripley to succeed, and not only because he is smarter than everyone else. He is an atypical underdog, both sexually and intellectually dangerous, and his knocking off of the rich can easily be interpreted in the Robin Hood language we knew as children, bereft of course of the silly Marxist impositions. The difference is that this Robin Hood wants all of Sherwood Forest to himself. 

The original Ripley differs from the dynamic if altered English-language film mainly owing to the engagement of separate agendas. While the film attends to the glamour of Ripley's new world, perhaps as a function of the medium in which he is portrayed, the novel tries to trace, more or less successfully, his moral architecture. I say more or less because there is only so much one can glean from a psyche that yearns for European culture and nonetheless has committed murder. The film also injects much more ado regarding his boat passages that the novel leaves unexplored; specifically, a hint about the character of Peter Smith-Kingsley is realized on the screen. That Mr. Ripley would like to be anyone except Mr. Ripley is overstating the point; what Mr. Ripley would truly like is the ease and fortune that would allow him to be anyone, including an inflated, idealized version of himself, whenever imitation is to his benefit or amusement – which may be the best definition of an actor ever put forth. As evinced by the quote that begins this review, however, there persists a certain pathos to the financially poor and underadvantaged Ripley, a young man who enjoys wallowing in self-pity as much as using his circumstances as undeniable motivation. Believe it or not, indeed. 

La doppia ora

Time will win, we are told by pundits of black holes and red giants, which means our choices are few and simple. We can bemoan our fate and live out our days in misery, or perhaps, one grey and fitful evening, abridge them violently; or we may accept our lot as temporary links on a chain of death that extends for billions of years and throw caution, money, and our own souls to the wind in the hope of forgetting our breaths' futility. Everyone, regardless of history and beliefs, will come to think the latter scenario the more palatable. After all, how could anyone reasonable even entertain a third scenario? What great mind would intuit the notion that our actions could be meaningful and that the pain we cause others could cause us more than sporadic remorse? A fair way to digress into the vagaries of this film.

We begin in a hotel room in this Italian city already known for mystical objects. A young, tomboyish woman is watching a culinary program trumpeting the value of honey and bread, and the appurtenances scattered in lusty haste on the floor – including a pair of high heels that would be hard to imagine her wearing – indicate she may have not been alone the previous night. As a chambermaid enters the room, she assures her that they will not get in each other's way. The maid smartly begins with the bathroom then finds the same tomboy at her elbow admiring her in that unique way some women are allowed to stare at other women. "You look better with your hair down," she says with a sad smile that conveys an offer, and the next thing we hear is a loud crash. The camera scurries to the bedroom to find an open window, a balcony, and a few flights below, our anonymous admirer of a moderately attractive, thirtysomething chambermaid sprawled on an expanding pool of blood. Only towards the middle of the film do we receive a hint at the role of this sequence, and even then the provided clarification lugs a few other questions in tow. 

From this oddly dissonant scene we are thrown into the world of speed dating, where our chambermaid Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) looks on as each suitor devotes his three minutes to sly winks and exhortations to mark him down as a "yes." After a few hopeless sessions, there appears Guido (Filippo Timi). Guido is not particularly handsome for an Italian male, and his thick beard seems like a fortress to a mouth which frowns a little too much. That mouth remains mum until it suddenly insists that Sonia indicate "no" for the fellow who just departed (a quick look at her survey reveals a uniform voting pattern). "I'm the last," he adds wryly, "and I may be the worst of all." There is, however, something remarkably insincere to such a pronouncement. Is he malevolent? Is he someone she already knows? Or is he simply participating as a favor to the bar's manager since there always seem to be "thirty women and twenty men" for these games? As coats and owners are reunited they meet again, walking and talking not so much flirtatiously as sadly cognizant of each other's loneliness (singles bars and cruises can indeed be some of the saddest places on earth). They part company after he makes a throwaway proposal that confident men are supposed to make and confident women are supposed to refuse – but neither one of our protagonists is confident. And as he explains the film's title and punctuates the explanation with the acute cynicism of a victim, we begin to suspect darker paths ahead. 

Guido has his graphic way with another woman from the egg-timer school of romance (presumably they both checked "yes") whom, of course, he promptly throws out of his apartment with the concession that she will be allowed to call him. When she knocks moments later and a rueful but very shut door confesses that it doesn't have his number, he batters it with an angry bottle; the difference between La doppia ora and most giallo films is that we then see him cleaning up the bottle and its mess. Meanwhile back at our hotel a smiling Sonia is told by Margherita, another chambermaid: "You've smiled four times in the month you've been here, and three of them were today." Margherita rightly suspects that Sonia has found a man, and warns her appropriately: "You have to be aware of good-looking men. They drink." If that were the only thing they did. Sonia and Guido will see each other again, of course, and they will stroll around at midnight, chain-smoke, and casually reveal small things about themselves. Guido was a cop; Sonia was abandoned by her father; Guido is a security guard; Sonia liked to wander through the Slovenian woods as a child. Or was it the Italian woods? From her accent (Rappoport is a well-known Russian actress), the viewer may accept that Sonia is not an Italian national; yet if she is truly a Slovene, why is she then so jumpy when one of Guido's cop friends pulls up in his car? And why, with her excellent command of the language, apparent intelligence, and European Union passport, is she relegated to taking a job usually reserved for immigrants with none of those three qualifications? We masticate briefly on these matters just as Guido and Sonia, now perhaps in love, spend a sleepy Sunday afternoon at the art-filled villa whose elaborate security system Guido alone controls. And as they draw closer, shy and yet passionate, into their first on-screen display of affection, they are interrupted by a masked group of armed men who incapacitate them and begin looting the same villa Guido is supposed to be protecting. 

What happens thereafter is both perfectly logical and the stuff of near-supernatural events, and nothing more should be revealed. Nevertheless, the careful viewer should ask himself the following questions: Why is Sonia listening to Spanish instructional tapes (on the day of the attack, her tape says: "Please help me. Today is a very important day for me.")? What do we really know about that photo of Guido and his allegedly deceased wife? Why does Sonia seem to know who Dolores Dominguez is? Why does Guido's cop friend Dante relate to him a long story about his own ex-wife? Why does one of the hotel guests call Sonia a "go-go dancer"? We may ask to what extant La doppia ora has the makings of a great film, whether the subject matter it treats is too slim and, ultimately, too personal to merit such status, questions justified by the film's curt if inevitable conclusion. While these pages have repeatedly championed the personal over the universal, the truly trivial – petty disputes, vendettas, grudges between schoolchildren, as well as anything and everything materialistic – is not fit to print. Sonia's tragedy, if that is the right word, is magnified in our common struggle against the past, against its prejudices and our mistakes, and the cloven structure of the film betrays a deeper divide between what was taken from her and what she took back. Took back? Don't let the poor-immigrant-ignored-daughter rigmarole fool you. Sonia, you see, is a taker, if an occasionally reluctant one. Her father may have thrown her to the wolves, but she had already made their acquaintance and doesn't fear them quite as much as you would think. And maybe we should recall that famous book about another femme fatale and the quote about being borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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.