CERTIFIED COPY - A noble failure

Reknowned Iranian auteur, Abbas Kiarostami, has made his first non-Farsi feature, CERTIFIED COPY. The movie plays as a two-hander between Juliette Binoche, who won an award at Cannes for her performance in the film, and opera-singer William Shimmel, who makes his feature debut. He plays an English author called James Miller, in Italy to promote his book. Its central idea is that copies are as valuable as originals - and indeed, that all originals, in art, are essentially copies of the real-life model anyway. Pulled away from his lecture, Binoche's character leaves a note inviting him to meet the next day. She is a fan - he has to sign many copies of his book for her - but then again, she doesn't seem to agree with his central thesis. The opening half hour sees them argue of the nature of worth and beauty. She is fan - nervous, following his direction - and he seems irritated, spending time with her merely to pass time. The movie is hard to engage with - the conversation is too dry, too stilted - maybe a fault of the translation? The only thing that held my attention was the recognition of familiar Kiarostami tropes - conversations in cars, mobile phones interrupting conversations, the inability to communicate. The movie seems strange, disconcerting, and rather boring - but was this deliberate - the calm before the storm?

Something changes in the movie when the protagonists drive to a Tuscan hill-town and take a coffee. James describes the inspiration for the book - having observed a scene with a mother and son in Florence. He does not finish describing it, but it has a deep emotional impact on Binoche's character. Was she the mother? Why is she crying? Why does he callously get up to take a call regardless of her distress? We will never know - this just isn't that kind of film. The second occurrence in the cafe that shifts the gears of the film is that the proprietress mistakes them to be a married couple. Binoche's character falls in with the mistake, and soon James does too. The tension increases - the disquiet increases. By playing husband and wife without ever discussing why or whether too, they don't just flirt, or have moments of tenderness, but bicker and disagree. Binoche's character resents her husbands long absences and neglect of their teenage son. Using the man in front of her as a proxy - a copy - she vents her frustration and he responds in kind. The intensity of the exchange makes us wonder if they are really acting or if they were acting in the first part of the film - are they really husband and wife?

The film is hard to read - or rather there are many ways in which to read it. But what troubles me is that I can't read its success because even the performances are hard to pin down. Is William Shimmel a wooden actor - outclassed by Binoche? Or is he playing a character that's meant to be wooden, callous, emotionally avoidant? Is Binoche's performance bad because it occasionally veers into hamminess? Or is she playing a woman who is melodramatic, emotionally unstable, needy?

Overall, I found CERTIFIED COPY intellectually interesting but ultimately unsatisfying. I admired it more than enjoying it. It raised interesting questions about proxies and originals, and the difficulty of communication. But it also raised too many questions about the essential quality of the performances - and I suspect the answers would not be forgiving to either actor. So, overall, a noble failure, but far better to fail at something provocative and slipper than mundane.

CERTIFIED COPY played Cannes 2010 and was released in France, Italy and the Netherlands earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK.

NINE - a series of songs sung by women who are basically in love with a shit

Rob Marshall directed two movies before NINE and I didn't like either of them. His movies are pretty on the surface and are obviously the product of much care and attention to detail. But somehow they miss the essential point of the story, not to mention any subtlety or subversion. And this is a major flaw in movies that deal with the the appearance and reality of sexual domination (MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA) and sexual and judicial corruption (CHICAGO).

And yet, still flush with the some-time success of CHICAGO, Marshall had the ambition to tackle NINE, a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical that was itself an adaptation of Fellini's seminal movie - perhaps one of the greatest movies of all time - 8 1/2. How can I explain to you what a technical, psychological and dramatic achievement Fellini's film was? It was a movie that dared to depict the impossibility and insanity of trying to create art in a commercial, celebrity-obsessed environment. Even more daring, it was a movie that threw its own director's psyche onto the screen - his narcissism, his eroticism, his conflicted relationship with his childhood, his relationship with his mother, his wife, his lovers....8 1/2 was a movie so radical and so brilliant that it redefined cinema. It was a movie so great that other directors tried to compete with it and came up short - Henri Georges Clouzot, with his INFERNO, had a heart attack trying.

If great artists have tried and failed to match Fellini, what can we say about Broadway composer and lyricist, Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston? Sadly not much. Yes, they have gotten the bare bones of the story - the narcissistic movie director battling writer's block and a kind of personal crisis - running between his wife and his lover - but never finding the pure adoration that only an Italian mother can give. But they fail to translate Fellini's daring and subversion to the Broadway stage. Worse still, the songs are rather anonymous. "Be Italian" has a decent melody but the rest are utterly forgettable. Worse still, the lyrics have none of the rapier-like wit of CHICAGO or CABARET. No, this is a poor vehicle indeed on which to hang a Hollywood film.

Rob Marshall takes poor fare and does nothing to improve it. Yes, there are a couple of new songs but none of them have any more punch than the originals. Indeed, the 60s pastiche Cinema Italiano, is truly bad. Worst of all, Marshall didn't have the balls to change the incredibly weak opening number. And, after all, what's a song and dance show without a bravura opening number? Catherine Zeta Jones in CHICAGO gripped the audience.

Okay, so the music is weak - hardly Marshall's fault. What about the purely cinematic choices? The casting is variable in its success. Daniel Day-Lewis is either miscast as the director, Guido Contini, or mis-directed by Marshall. Day-Lewis' attempt at an Italian accent distracts from his perfect physical embodiment of the distracted, harrassed, hunch-shouldered director. Penelope Cruz and Judi Dench have a lot of fun and perform with gusto as Guido's lover and loyal friend. Marion Cotillard is superb as Guido's suffering wife. Fergie of The Black Eyed Peas is the best singer and performer by far in the best song in the piece, despite Marshall saddling her with frightful hair and make-up and entirely missing the eroticism of the encounter with the kid. Less happily, we have Nicole Kidman doing nothing special as the Anita Ekberg inspired movie star Claudia. Sophia Loren survives on her iconic status. Kate Hudson is entirely out of her depth but luckily only has to do a MTV dance routine before she's off stage. Her part is entirely disposable.

Most importantly, Marshall doesn't attempt to translate the complexity at the heart of the piece. And without that, Guido comes across as merely annoying, unsympathetic and whiny - a big kid with a mamma complex and an over-extended libido. The women, with the exception of the wife, are not really developed. As a consequence, when one of them does something dramatic, it seems not so much out of character, as we don't know what her character really is, but out of the blue. It's just hard to care. The movie becomes a series of songs sung by women who are basically in love with a shit. And frankly, there's nothing entertaining about that.

NINE is on release in the US, UK and Slovenia. It opens next week in Greece and Canada. It opens in January in Israel, the Netherlands, South Korea, Cyprus, Denmark, Brazil, Italy, Australia, Spain, Taiwan and Romania. It opens in February in Argentina, Hungary, Sweden, France, Finland, Belgium, Germany and Singapore. It opens in March in Japan.

Pantheon movie of the month - SALO OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM

Pier Paolo Pasolini is one of the most important directors of the twentieth century: he lived, portrayed and died the political crises that plagued Europe and the world.

SALO is the last film that Pasoloni made. It comes after his social realist films where, as a committed Communist, he tried to make honest works about working class life and celebrated honest sexuality. He had become disillusioned with the project, and the non-responsive of the working class audience. SALO is thus a brutal and bleak critique of the political regimes and social changes he had lived through in Italy. First, and most powerfully, it is a criticism of the extreme corruption and degradation of the Fascist regime. Second, it is a criticism of what came after the war, when Italy "caught up" under Marshall Plan economic aid, creating "Il Boom!" - a society of consumers gorging themselves.

The title of SALO also works on two levels: first as an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's infamous novel and second as a reference to the small town on Lake Garda whence Mussolini ran the final fascist government of Italy, propped up by Hitler. The movie shows four powerful men representing each type of power: feudal, religious, legal and political, enjoying absolute power at the end of a dying regime. Together with their complicit guards and two old prostitutes, they imprison an equal number of young men and women and subject them to horrific sexual torture. Finally, the prisoners are killed.

The point about Salo is that the sexually explicit material is not there to titillate (as in Sade) but to shock and disturb. And it is not there to shock gratuitously or in a sensationalist manner. It is there for a particular and explicit political purpose: to illustrate the absolutely corruption and complete power of the Fascist regime. Further, Pasolini is making the point that, fundamentally, sexual relations are power relations. He is also expressing a Hobbesian world-view: man is corrupt and, if given the opportunity of absolute power, will descend into violence. Sexual violence is an important part of that. Sex in SALO is used to degrade. It is not erotic. And it is this continuing, bludgeoning, extreme degradation that makes SALO such a bleak, punishing film.

Technically, the film achieves brutality without titillation by framing its scenes as stylised, symmetric tableaux that distance the viewer from the action. Sexual acts are shown in cruel light and filmed without the pleasing soft-focus of typical sex scenes in mainstream movies. The audience POV is often the same as that of the guards or the torturers, making us feel even more uneasy about what we are watching. This is especially true of the final scenes of torture, which we see through the binoculars of the torturers. This has the added benefit of showing the final scenes of murder at a distance, so that we imagine more than we are actually shown.

If the material is shocking, Pasolini has achieved his end. Maybe, he is saying, we should have been more shocked by, and more active in resistance to, the political degradation of Fascism. If he has to resort to sexual torture to shock us, isn't that partly our fault?

The Duke: We Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we're masters of the state. In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power.

SALO opened in 1976 and immediately encountered difficulties with the censors because of its sadistic and sexually explicit material. In 2000 the British Film Institute instigated a screening and debate about the film, resulting in the the release of a BFI DVD. This includes the film, uncut, and a supplemental disk replete with fascinating documentaries about Pasolini, the film, and the censor's response to it.