Drum Media reviews: Certified Copy & Inside Job

CERTIFIED COPY

It would be easy – an unfortunate – to mistake Certified Copy as an emission from the pits of coffee-table arthouse hell. Yes, it stars Juliette Binoche as a Tuscany-dwelling antique dealer, and an opera singer (William Shimmell) making his acting debut as a British author, in town for a lecture on his book of the same title as the film, which questions the value of artistic ‘originality’. And yes, it prominently features the two of them walking around picturesque Tuscan locations, engaged in an extended discussion of marital woes and questions of artistic authenticity.

But then, this is also a film by Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian maverick who has for his extraordinary 40-year career created grand artistic expressions using the simplest means. As such, Certified Copy begins as a standard-issue entry into the highbrow talkfest genre, in the vein of My Dinner With Andre or Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Sunset diptych, before morphing into a story of gamesmanship, as Binoche and Shimmell discuss the subject of the latter’s lecture. Putting his ideas about the ‘value of the fake’ into practice, the two begin playing out scenes from a marriage – their own, or are they making it up on the spot? And does it matter to the spectator, i.e, us?

From thereon the film becomes rich with emotional resonance, as questions of art and the power structures of relationships are conflated. Only occasionally does the dialogue creak – a common casualty of a filmmaker working outside their native tongue. Otherwise, it’s an uncommonly powerful film; beguiling to watch in its visual splendour and stimulating to contemplate, both before and long after the frame-within-frame final shot.

Originally published Drum Media Issue 1047, p64 (Flipbook here)

INSIDE JOB

Many consider Charles Ferguson’s 2006 documentary No End in Sight to be the definitive film account of the Iraq war. Likewise, his latest doco, Inside Job, will be hard to beat for its meticulous account of the events leading up to America’s great financial crisis of 2008, a wholly avoidable economic meltdown in which millions of Americans were put out of employment as result of the careless, vain and criminal activity of a handful of Wall Street elites – none of whom have since faced imprisonment. The human toll is limited to only a few glimpses of poverty (the images of a Floridan ‘tent city’ are especially sobering), but even under Ferguson’s rational, largely unmanipulative approach, it all registers as an epic horror film.

Narrated by Matt Damon, the we begin in Iceland with an abstract outlining the former prime minister’s neglect of the economy. It serves to distinguish the culpability as not being limited to American leaders alone, and it’s with this foreknowledge that Ferguson universalises his subject. Rigorously structured into linear chapters, it’s also lucid in its presentation of a flood of banking terminology.

Of course, it’s this complexity and level-headedness – a few questionable interview tactics aside – that will likely deter those after the entertaining agitprop of a Michael Moore film. And the end-credit sequence of last year’s Will Ferrell vehicle The Other Guys (detailing the statistics of corporate crime related to the crisis) will be sufficient movie treatment for many viewers. But those seeking a thorough cinematic investigation should rush to see this masterfully assembled, infuriating and altogether riveting tome.

Originally published Drum Media Issue 1047, p64 (Flipbook here)