Certified Copy

Juliette Binoche and William Shimmel wonder who will play the drunk this time in Certified Copy

Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, from 2010, is a robust work from a modern master. Elle (Juliette Binoche) attends a lecture by art critic James Miller (opera Baritone William Shimmel) who questions notions of originality and authenticity. The identity of each character is relative, though, and each changes identity halfway through the movie. For Kiarostami, each mutation is an embodiment of masculine and feminine traits: passion bridling against order, emotion versus intellect, instinct versus reason. This is not a union of opposites, but two ambivalent creatures juggling their senses and wits.

During the first half of the film, Binoche is a single lady who is equivocal in her attempt at seducing the writer. He is the more impassive figure, she the more chimerical. ("La Donna E Mobile") She veers from kittenish repartee with the writer to curt dismissals of his insights. She attempts to provoke and delight him, but he remains remote. In the second half of the film, the couple morphs into veterans of a longstanding marriage. Binoche's character tries to fan the flames of lost passion by smearing on lipstick and reminiscing about their honeymoon, but, again, the male member does not respond or recognize her intent.

The presence of Jean-Claude Carriere tips us off to Kiarostami's intent, an updating of the European art films of the 60s and 70s. He also channels Rossellini's Voyage to Italy, another film of an ambivalent couple walking the streets of Italy. Certified Copy is not a traditional dramatic narrative or romance, but a meditation on subjectivity. The window frames, picture frames, mirrors and telephone screens that pop up in Certified Copy point to the film's message: we are all stuck within our own frame of view and all human connection is tenuous.

The Devil's Own

Let the PG orgy begin!

Cyril Frankel's The Devil's Own, from 1966, finds schoolteacher Joan Fontaine battling an approximation of Satanic sex magick in the English countryside. The direction is repressed in the Hammer fashion, unfortunately not moderating Fontaine's attempts at hysterics. The film is like Midsommar without directorial style or nudity, even the orgy is PG. The script is good though and Kay Walsh (Nancy in Lean's Oliver Twist) is great fun as the high priestess. Fontaine should be applauded for trying to jump start her career with horror as Joan, Bette and sister Olivia did that decade. She shepherded the project after a four year absence from the screen, but it was all for naught commercially. The Devil's Own is pleasant light entertainment, but lacks the dreadful impact of true cinematic horror.

Transit

A moment of repose in Transit

Christian Petzold's Transit transposes the narrative of Anna Seyhers' 1944 novel, set in a France falling under Nazi occupation in 1940, to the paranoid present. Franz Resgowski plays Georg, a German refugee who assumes the identity of a dead writer in order to leave France. The film's portrait of besieged emigres is a response to Europe's refugee influx, as in Kaurismaki's Le Havre, Dumont's P'tit Quinquin, Noe's Climax and many more.

Georg, as he waits for visas and transit out of Marseilles, becomes entwined with a widow searching for her husband and a widowed mother whose husband Georg was on the lam with. Petzold's widescreen compositions emphasize the lateral movements of escape. Contrapuntally, the characters are constantly being hemmed in by police, guardsman and railway bulls. This sense becomes more pronounced as Georg is trapped in Marseilles waiting for his ship out,

Petzold conjures a mood of romantic fatalism, to the final twist. The lovers in Transit are ambivalent about their choices, be they concerning emigration or elective affinities. Petzold and his cohorts have fashioned a passionately wrought work about heroism in the face of doom. Transit is one of the past year's best films, capping a decade of work that rivals any of this era.