The new movie Certified Copy is a profound and beautiful meditation on art, marriage, and how the nature of the human person manifests itself in the playing of roles. The bare plot summary: A Frenchwoman (Juliette Binoche) who owns an antique shop in Italy shows a visiting British author (William Shimell) around a village one afternoon, and they discuss art and relationships. This description will unfortunately lead the viewer to expect something between twee and pretentious — but in fact the film is closer to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in its emotional impact, as the two leads work out the emotional problems they have with their spouses, each using his/her one-afternoon companion as a proxy. At times, over the course of the afternoon, they even pretend (for the benefit of various other characters) that they are, in fact, married to each other. The meaning of marriage becomes clearer and clearer to them as they see the roles they are playing, and how those roles are mirrored in other couples that they run across. There is rather too much being written about marriage these days, all from a standpoint of politics or sociology; this is a rare work that tackles marriage as a spiritual issue. Indeed, the last work of fiction I encountered that took marriage quite this seriously was Karol Wojtyla’s The Jeweler’s Shop — a moving drama, but rather more opaque than Certified Copy.

The relative lack of opacity in this movie was a special cause of delight to me, because the director is Iranian-born Abbas Kiarostami. I recognize that I risk excommunication from the church of cinephiles for admitting this, but I found some of Kiarostami’s Iranian movies — near universally acclaimed as masterpieces — to be tedious and pointless wastes of time, formal exercises that neither rejoice the eye nor come to grips with real human issues. (I’m thinking especially of 1997’s Taste of Cherry.) So I went to see Certified Copy with a measure of apprehension — only to discover that it’s both gorgeous to look at and humanly compelling.

It really helps that Juliette Binoche, stunning at 47, gives a career performance; there’s a moment, 45 minutes in, when she sheds an unexpected tear and suddenly forces us to revise our understanding of everything that has happened so far in the film. It’s a great moment — I got literal goosebumps from it — and it sets the tone for the last hour of the movie, as emotional confrontations force the viewer, again and again, to revise his judgment about the characters and the roles they are playing. What is it to be a man? What is it to be a woman? How do we discover the truth about humanity through our enactment of gender roles? It’s marvelously refreshing to see a movie that sees these questions not from the hackneyed political perspectives of pro- and anti-feminism, but rather through a spiritually open humanism. Strongly recommended.