Quote:
Originally Posted by Ray Jackson
I watched Certified Copy for the first time and really liked it.
The picture it reminded me of the most was Before Midnight.
One thing that confused me though was the supposed mystery over whether [Show spoiler]they’re actually a real couple or just pretending to be a real couple. Is that really even a question? Could two people who just met have those kinds of emotionally-charged conversations/arguments? Nobody could be that good at playacting with someone they just met.
For me personally, the answer was blatantly obvious.
I think the picture would’ve been even better if it had been more ambiguous.
...still very satisfied that I blind bought it. |
Hey Ray! Always enjoy your posts. And glad to see someone's talking about Certified Copy. I think it's a great film (and yeah, I just watched it for the 3rd time so I could remember stuff). I do think it's probably more ambiguous than you first suspect. Or possibly the other meaning entirely.
SPOILERS BELOW.
In my opinion, I absolutely think
[Show spoiler]they're not married and have never met before. If you watch it one more time, you might agree with me. I think the key to the movie is the beginning. The son does not speak about the man as if that's his father, even though the couple later pretend to have parental squabbles about the son. In the beginning, the son refers to the writer as "That guy", his translator as "That other guy", and tells his mom: "I know you like this James and want to fall in love with him". Never once does he call him Dad, nor show any sign that he's ever met the guy.
So then what's up with the 2nd half of the movie? Like you said, how are they so good at playacting? It's actually handled fairly naturally. Before the cafe scene, they're just arguing about art and life, as any two strangers might in a Woody Allen movie (or, as you said, a Linklater movie). It's not until the cafe owner mistakes them as husband and wife that Binoche ever starts referring to them as such (and she stumbles at first....when the lady asks how long they've been married, her answer is "uhhhhh, 15 years"). But she latches on to the idea and uses it as a means to complain about (presumably) her ex-husband. Whoever she was married to, it obviously didn't go well. He's nowhere to be seen and she states that she was "not well" a few years back. So she airs out her complaints to the cafe owner -- including that her husband doesn't speak Italian or French (which turns out to be wrong -- we see the writer, in just a few minutes, speaking French quite well to her). But Binoche is doing this, substituting William in as her husband, because here's her chance to make an instant copy of her marriage (or a marriage in general), in the hopes that the copy will be better than the original. When she tells William that she's now represented themselves as a couple of 15 years, he goes along with it because he's an intellectual that's built a career speculating about these kinds of identities, although he sometimes struggles to keep up (one of his first lines when the game starts is "what do you want me to say next?").
The interesting thing is that they're both astute enough to know that IF they were a married couple of 15 years, it probably wouldn't be like a charming lovable first date. It would be a day of tension, of passive-aggressiveness. He'd complain about the wine, and not want to take photographs with strangers, and she'd try to sentimentalize their early days and get mad at him when he wasn't receptive. Which is exactly what we see play out. But they're also taught by older married couples (the ones by the fountain, and the old people at the church) -- that it's not always like that. The writer is told to put his arm around her, be close to her, that's all she's looking for...which is what Binoche asks of him at the end.
So then what does the movie mean? I think it's a movie about finding love, no matter how you find it, and appreciating it, whether it's an original or a copy. In the car, they talk about Binoche's sister and her husband as having found the secret of life. And it is her sister who (as a fan of costume jewelry and gas fireplaces) says: "A good copy is better than the original". So Binoche and the writer are two people who, by the end, are giving themselves a chance to make a copy of a relationship: to not start with a first date, to not fall in love, to not have a wedding (like they keep seeing throughout the film -- there are various weddings). They're giving themselves the opportunity to skip over all of that and have a 15 year old marriage without having lived any of it -- to see if it has value. The end shot I think is really meaningful. The writer is looking at himself in the mirror, presumably thinking "I can walk out of this hotel and never talk to her again. Or I can embrace this copy of a marriage and grow old with her". The movie is constantly hypothesizing that a copy can even be better than an original. One of the writer's lines in his lecture is: "Forget the original, just get a good copy." Originals are bullshit anyway, he's always saying. Even an original painting is just a reproduction of the human subject anyway. The only true originals are humans themselves...and even though it's a weird scenario, maybe he's found a true original for himself.
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