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Michael Kerpan wrote:You have SUCH a way with words,

Nothing wrote:Still he's likely to get something, if only because the selection is so thin this year + he happens to be in vogue, whatever that means. But the Palme? That would be stretching it, although hardly unprecendented

Michael Kerpan wrote:

rs98762001 wrote:A sequel to Burnt By The Sun makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's been a long time since I've seen the film (which I remember as being wonderful) but didn't pretty much all the major characters get killed at the end?!

IMDB has a capsule summary:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0403645/plotsummary" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This sounds astonishingly like the most propagandistic films actually made in the USSR during WW2.

HistoryProf wrote:Can you imagine if Michael Bay and Bush were best friends and he made a film about the gloriously patriotic Gulf War? Russians never cease to fascinate me in terms of their culture and devotion to propaganda.

Duncan Hopper wrote:Have you seen it then?

Nothing wrote: A Screaming Man. Oh dear, I didn't realise this was from the director of the God-awful Daratt.

A captivating cinematic divertissement, Certified Copy marries post-modern reality games with mature romantic comedy in a single breezy and thought-provoking package. This is Kiarostami’s most commercial film to date - not only because of the presence of a radiant Juliette Binoche or its photogenic Tuscan settings, but because it is the first of the Iranian auteur’s metacinematic experiments to conform, at least on one level, to Hollywood genre conventions. The pitch could well be: “imagine a middle-aged Before Sunrise rolled up with Under the Tuscan Sun but spiked with elements of The Game”.

Certified Copy"
Bottom Line: Kiarostami's sardonic reflection on marriage is playful, engaging Euro art cinema under the Tuscan sun.
CANNES -- After years of working on photography, poetry and more experimental films, Abbas Kiarostami makes an engaging return to narrative cinema in a delicate, bittersweet comedy set in romantic Italy. "Certified Copy" slyly explores the ins and outs of marriage and the many ways men and women fail to think alike. French star Juliette Binoche will give the film a leg up in Europe, though wide international audiences are probably not in the cards for such an off-beat item. This erudite film is spoken in three languages, English, French and a bit of Italian.

The sardonically humorous story of a man and a woman whose marriage has gone cold echoes Roberto Rossellini's critically revered "Voyage in Italy" (1954), in which a British couple played by George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman come to Naples on the verge of divorce and find reconciliation amid the mysteries of nature, art and religious belief. Kiarostami is not so optimistic.

ellipsis7 wrote:Shouting is not a word I associate with AK's cinema...

Certified Copy (2009)
Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Reviewed at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival

The best film so far in this year’s Cannes competition, Abbbas Kiarostami’s first feature made outside Iran is in many ways a departure in terms of style and content, yet at the same time it is utterly Kiarostami and one couldn’t really imagine it having been made by anyone else. In short, it’s simply the tale of a day in the life of an English writer, in Tuscany to promote his latest book, and a French woman who brings her 12-year-old son along with her to hear him speak.

In fact, it's far more complicated than that, and certainly far more ambiguous: after a while it becomes apparent that the man may have known the woman for some years – indeed, they may even be man and wife. Certainly, during the course of a brief day trip to a nearby village, where they do a little sightseeing and a lot of talking, they run the gamut of emotions as they discuss first matters of representation – the man’s book is concerned with issues to do with artistic originals and copies – and then concerns rather closer to home: relationships between men and women, parents and children, and then, it would appear, specific details in the history of their own relationship.

It’s an extraordinary film, steadily building to a very moving final scene by way of a seemingly meandering but in fact very focused narrative held together by meticulous and subtle mise-en-scène. The performances – by Juliette Binoche and opera-singer William Shimell – are excellent, while the whole thing not only touches on all manner of male-female concerns (I imagine everyone will recognise something of themselves at some point in the film) but develops a number of recurrent Kiarostami themes about art and nature, reality and representation, life and death. Superb.

Author: Geoff Andrew

I also catch the evening showing of Certified Copy (Copie Conforme), a Tuscany-set romance from Abbas Kiarostami (Iranian) that stars Juliette Binoche (French) and the singer William Shimell (British). This seemed to split opinion but I liked it a lot. Binoche and Shimell meet for the first time and drive out to a hilltop town where they first accept and then furnish the misconception that they are actually a couple, married for 15 years and struggling to keep the flame alight. Shimell plays an art historian and there is much talk of copies and forgeries, what's real and what's fake. But what this quiet, contemplative film seems to be suggesting is that we are all forgeries and that we dramatise our lives for the benefit of ourselves and those around us. And if that's the human condition, who says it's not authentic?

Kitano is a gifted Japanese director who has made many films I admire, but this must be his worst.

...he (Kitano) is absolutely back in peak form...it is clearly his best since Zatoichi and one which stands comfortably beside both Sonatine and Fireworks to create a trio of truly iconic international crime films.