Certified conformity/copie conforme

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimel PG cert, IFI/Light House, Dublin, 106 min

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI has spent four decades making oblique, fascinating films in his native Iran. Usually hanging around simple tales, frequently pared down to the starkest structure, pictures such as Through the Olive Trees, Taste of Cherryand The Wind Will Carry Uscould not be more firmly rooted in their dusty locations.

What would a European Kiarostami film look like? It’s like trying to imagine an Icelandic tango. The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is: very, very like a hundred other middlebrow European art pictures.

Set among the pleasanter valleys and prettier ristoranti of Tuscany, Certified Copystars Julliette Binoche as an antique dealer who elects to escort a visiting writer round the sun-bleached countryside. The companions have never met before, but, as they interact with locals and ponder philosophical quandaries, they begin to come across like a jaded married couple.

When a woman in a cafe mistakenly describes them as man and wife, they decide to play along. But the game seems to get out of hand. The couple pull off the impersonation a little too effectively.

The look of the piece – dappled and dusty – is lazily seductive in the manner of so many art-house crowd-pleasers. The plot rubs up against Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy, Richard Linklater's Before Sunriseand David Lean's Brief Encounteron its passage to an ending that echoes Harold Pinter's The Lovers. Couldn't Kiarostami devise a single fresh idea?

Oh, you fools. The film is, don't forget, called Certified Copy, and the writer (played with impressive suavity by opera singer William Shimell) has selected forgery, plagiarism and artistic reproduction as his subject.

There is a degree of arrogance in Kiarostami’s approach. Defeated by the challenge of freshening up European cinema, he offers a weary treatise on the difficulty – not to say undesirability – of delivering entirely original material. But the actors do make something spooky of their puzzling relationship. Indeed, such is the icy connection between Binoche and Shimell that one can’t help but think there is a better, simpler, less referential film bursting to get out.

That, of course, may well be part of Kiarostami’s twisty argument.