Kiarostami’s film about a man and a woman ambling through an Italian village together, deep in conversation about love and art, is impossible to summarize. It is not clear who this man and woman are. We puzzle at suggestions that they may have been married in the past, or perhaps they are now. We struggle with Kiarostami through permutations of intimacy and conflict until we realize that the film is, like any intimate relationship, an act of memory. Every viewing of Certified Copy reveals new textures and new angles in basic questions about how we remember those closest to us. But one always leaves the film with the impression that we are all histories of love.
—Michael Leary
Arts & Faith Lists:
2013 Top 25 Marriage Films — #2
2015 Top 25 Films on Memory — #19