Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Certified Copy
2010 · Abbas Kiarostami · Certified Copy on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the village reflected in the windshield as they talk. (camera)
Bigazzi keeps the camera on their faces while Lucignano slides across the glass in front of them, stone and shopfronts laid right over their skin.
Payoff: Two images share one frame, and the film never tells you which one is the subject.
Notice characters speaking almost straight into the camera. (camera)
Kiarostami repeatedly places the lens where the listener would stand, so each of them addresses you nearly head on.
Payoff: You are put in the position of the person being spoken to, not just an observer.
Listen for footsteps, traffic, and bells instead of music. (sound)
The film has almost no score, relying on ambient sound, and moves between English, French, and Italian as the two talk and mistranslate each other.
Payoff: Without music to guide you, you have to listen to the words as closely as they do.
Notice how many other couples appear around them in town. (staging)
A bride and groom posing for photos, an older couple on the street, a café owner behind the counter: the town keeps offering versions of a couple to look at.
Payoff: Every other pair in the film becomes a kind of mirror held up to these two.
Notice the museum piece the woman calls a copy. (setting)
What looks like a prized original in the museum turns out, by her account, to be a celebrated reproduction, echoing James's own book about copies.
Payoff: The film raises its whole question about authenticity before it ever touches the two of them.
Once you have seen it
Watch the moment she lets the café owner's mistake stand. (structure)
A stranger assumes they are a married couple of fifteen years, and rather than correct her, the woman simply agrees, and the whole film pivots to behave as if it were true.
Payoff: Nothing signals the shift. No flashback, no cut, marks where strangers end and spouses begin. In the reading: falsifying narration. The reading calls this falsifying narration: two versions of who they are held as equally true, with neither one demoted to pretend.
Watch Binoche apply earrings and lipstick at the mirror. (staging)
She prepares in the glass for an anniversary that may or may not exist, her reflection doubling exactly as her identity is doubling in the story.
Payoff: The mirror shows you two of her at once, the way the film shows you two versions of this relationship. In the reading: crystal-image (hyalosign). The reading calls this a crystal image: the actual woman and her reflection exchange places too fast to tell apart.
Watch how the film ends without resolving the question. (structure)
The last scene leaves them in a hotel room with church bells outside, and offers no flashback or line of dialogue that settles which version of them is real.
Payoff: You are left holding both readings at once instead of being handed a correct one.
Carry this in: Watch the glass and the mirrors. The film never tells you which reflection is the real one.