2010 · NR · Film
A film that asks you to hold two contradictory things at once — and rewards you for not resolving them.
Abbas Kiarostami’s first film made outside Iran is built on a premise that the film itself refuses to explain: an Englishman and a French woman spend an afternoon together in Tuscany, and somewhere in the middle of it the nature of their relationship quietly shifts. Whether what follows is real or performed — whether they are strangers playing at being married, or a long-married couple playing at being strangers — the film declines to say. Juliette Binoche won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for her performance, and it is the kind of acting that makes you forget you are watching acting. The Tuscan light does the rest.
Watch it with someone who enjoys a film that doesn’t arrive at a conclusion — who finds ambiguity generative rather than frustrating. It is a film about authenticity, which means it is also a film about marriage, about love that has calcified into habit, about whether any of that matters. It rewards a second viewing more than almost any film of its decade, because everything looks different once you have sat with the question it is asking. Best on a weekend evening when conversation afterward is available.
VERDICT · A film that shifts beneath your feet as you watch it — and stays with you longer for it.
POUR · A Brunello di Montalcino, or any Tuscan red with enough structure to hold the evening.
Planning an evening around this? Films That End Better Than They Begin →
The kind of film that rewards a second viewing. Find it on Blu-ray.
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