I loved the film, faults and all. But no need to go into what reviewers wrote, I rather mention three thoughts, NOT written in reviews.
1. In the fifties and into the sixties, existentialists such as Sartre, were big into Authenticity and Authentic Experiences, as peak experiences of total being or beingness in an experiential moment of complete merger with the moment of some act. The existentialists took all this quite seriously.
I thought the CC movie 'deconstructed' this and totally destroyed it by dissecting its assumptions, revealing the myth or illusion of anything being authentic, and not a copy, even the so called existential moments.
So part of the delight of CC for me was this antithetical response to existentialism's "pretenses" 40 years on. A conversational response generations later!
2. Then there is a marvelous book, Three Men on the Way to a Dance, that focuses on mass production as a 20th Century stage of economic development. And, directly discusses, such things as the impact of a photographs of painting that when reprinted became as eye appealing as the original yet now everyone can have one hanging on their wall. Certified Copies, as a democratizing process and a murderous one too in terms of mass warfare..
This movie and the above book furthermore raise the question of the real role of art and other museums in the modern or post modern world.
3. Finally, for symbolism, I thought the startled look on the authors face at the end of the movies when he could see and hear the church bells ringing, was because the author realized the bells where saying, "ask not for whom the bells toll, they toll for thee" and at this point in the story it was his recognition that his life was at a juncture --- not just the tolling of the time and would he catch the train, but they tolled, a recognition that that many illusions had died in as a consequence of the role playing he and the antique lady were engaged in and that he was having an authentic experience in copying a marriage with an emotional narrative history that was being relived in play acting and yet had become REAL, a certified copy. Ha! Delightful.
Sam WrightBangkok
The book that Sam describes is Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, by Richard Powers. He's a really interesting author and his books focus on ideas (many of them!) perhaps more than character and plot. The film and this book offer fascinating parallels.
