Certified Copy at the New York Film Festival

Lesson number one learned at last night's screening of Certified Copy at Lincoln Center: New Yorkers love Juliette Binoche. The applause, whoops, and cheers when she took the stage counted as downright ecstatic coming from the normally sedate and high-minded New York Film Festival crowd. Lesson number two: Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's most celebrated filmmaker, can manage actors and adults as well as he can the amateurs and children who often populate his films. Here, he focuses tightly on the ambiguities of romantic attachment and need, using an are-they-or-aren't-they? structure that elicits as many winces as it does laughs. In the Q-and-A afterward, Binoche said that Kiarostami told her to play herself, but that the more she thought about it, the more she realized that her character is a stand-in for Kiarostami, trying to figure out how acting --- be it in the movies or in life --- really works.

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