The latest feature from Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami

The celebrated Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami turns 71 this year. Over the course of forty-plus years of filmmaking he has radically altered the face of Iranian cinema and spawned dozens of imitators, experimented incessantly and unflinchingly and come up with several undisputed masterpieces (Taste of Cherry, the Koker trilogy and the inimitable Close-Up.) Much like his admirer Godard, Kiarostami has managed to make films that are as much about the medium itself as they are about the human condition and the existential tug of war between love and survival.

His latest as writer-director, Certified Copy, is also his first narrative feature to be shot outside of Iran. It follows a man and a woman (Juliet Binoche and William Shimell) on a daytrip in the Tuscan countryside. The two start out like any couple on a first date, bantering innocently about art and authenticity (she is a dealer in sculpture, he has just written a book about the significance of copies in art); but soon the exchanges take on more weight, layers of emotion burst through and eventually the relationship begins to morph, cracking and shifting like an earthquake in slow motion.

Abbas Kiarostami, who now resides in FranceIn an astonishingly brilliant move, Kiarostami pins this shift on the moment that the two daytrippers are first observed (or, in academic parlance, interpellated) by a third party—in this case, a matronly café-owner who presumes to give our heroine a quick lesson in marital gratefulness. As soon as she nonchalantly refers to the couple as husband and wife, they start to interact as such—as though her perception actually carries the power of fully determining their relationship. Though pulled off with utmost fluidity and grace, this sequence is one of the more powerful and shocking in recent film—an elaborate acrobatic act performed without a net, before our very eyes. It is one of those cinematic twists that recasts every other moment that has gone before it and informs every one that comes after.

Once they overtly inhabit the roles of husband and wife, Binoche and Shimell do a lot of bickering as they visit (or is it revisit?) some of the local sights. Their arguments are so familiar as to verge on the mundane: you're never around, you neglect our child, you forgot our anniversary, you take too long in the bathroom, you never notice how hard I try to make myself pretty for you, and so on. Perhaps this sense of painful banality is Kiarostami's intention—but as I watched the film there were points where I literally thought I had had a fugue episode and was really back at home watching a week's worth of Dr. Phil on the DVR. Still, every time Certified Copy feels like is going to tip fully over into cliché, it is rescued by a gesture, a look, a camera movement or a spoken line that draws us back into the couple's slippery world.

Watching Binoche is always a sublime experience—the rare pleasure of seeing an actor inseparably adjoined with a character. Here she switches nimbly between three languages, and instantaneously takes on the nuances and mannerisms associated with each. I always feel sorry for her co-stars, who must feel like they are caught in a footrace with a jaguar. Extra bravery points go to Mr. Shimell, who has allowed himself to be cast opposite la Binoche having never before acted in a film (he is a professional opera singer of some note). He holds his own and mostly feels natural, though in the more emotional scenes the ‘acting' does leak through around the edges.

Much has been said about Kiarostami's persistently meaningful use of the camera and mise-en-scene; here he works with stalwart Italian D.P. Luca Bigazzi, and continues to extract poetry out of each and every shot. He also, once again, manages to avoid anything that remotely resembles a tidy resolution, wielding his trademark ambiguity like a blunt weapon even through the very last shot of the film. All along, the audience has to work just as hard as the couple to try and figure out just what the two of them mean to each other.

While it does not break major ground thematically or stylistically, Certified Copy is clearly the work of a mature, comfortable director working at the height of his skills, albeit away from his native country and mother tongue. And it constitutes another gentle but powerful statement in his ever-growing portfolio of humanistic expression, encapsulated in a line spoken by Binoche late in the story: "If we were a little more tolerant of each other's weaknesses, we'd be less alone." Would that the entire world took this truism to heart.

[Certified Copy opens in New York and Los Angeles on March 11, 2011.]

Omid Arabian is the Film Editor at the Levantine Review and a roving writer in Los Angeles.