Spine 612: Certified Copy

Abbas Kiarostami is a man who understands the intimacy of a conversation in the front seat of a car. While Taste of Cherry (1997), which we watch way back at Spine 45 is the pinnacle of that truth, Certified Copy (2010) has plenty of driving and talking before it settles into sight seeing and talking. To keep things interesting, Certified Copy is a sort of surrealist drama, with the relationship between the two parties in this extended conversation in a slow flux, from strangers to estranged spouses in the course of an afternoon. Also on the Criterion disc is an early Kiarostami work, The Report (1977), also dealing with a couple becoming estranged, but this time against the backdrop of bureaucratic corruption in pre-revolution Iran. We talk about both films this week, as well as the nature of communication both within the films and to us as viewers when we're dealing with subtitle tracks that aren't great.