Certified Copy
or, On Being Known
“All she wants from you is that you walk beside her and lay your hand on her shoulder.” — Certified Copy (2010)
A day, a day, a year; the moment I am with you, a year is a day / The moment I am without you, a day is a year / Because I dream of seeing you, my eyes see nothing but dreams — Hafez, Ghazal 464
A new freedom inside, getting rid of my desire / Do you like what you see? — Kylie Minogue, “Spinning Around” (2000)
But since I've met you and moved to Sydney, I haven't listened to one ABBA song. That's because my life is as good as an ABBA song. It's as good as Dancing Queen. — Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
In Certified Copy (2010), the late great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami tells a story of an English writer’s visit to Tuscany to discuss his eponymous book, a meditation on art and authenticity. In Tuscany, he meets a French woman, an antiques dealer, who attends his talk and then invites him on a walk through the town to visit its local art and playfully challenge some of his more contentious ideas. Throughout their day, the relationship between the two shifts and blurs; what starts as playing along with others’ mistaken assumptions about their history and dynamic turns into a discussion about family, obligation, memory, and relationality that crosses language and credulity. As the film unfolds, at various points, the two — who met for the first time that morning — take the poses of a married couple, distant but struggling to reconnect, as though conforming to the perceptions of external actors who see them as co-parents, spouses, and lovers. The viewer is frequently exposed to the two from odd angles, forcing us to see them how others see them, fractured and imprecise.
At the end of the film, they are together in a hotel room under the moon, reflecting on a memory that only one of them has yet they appear to share. The movie ends before the matter of the nature of their relationship is ever resolved. The questions of who these people are to each other, if their memories were real, what their memories mean, and if they could ever truly be shared, are all left open.
I saw Certified Copy (2010) for the first time in the summer of 2023, about two months after my ex-boyfriend and I broke up. I was visiting my family in Quebec who I rarely see, at their very nice country house, and I was completely miserable. I had just taken up smoking, a bizarre new habit that I adopted only because my ex was a smoker and doing it made me feel closer to him. The only other time I watched the movie was a year and a half after that, about two months ago from today, while visiting my boyfriend in Australia. He had moved to Sydney for medical school in January 2024, after we’d dated for just over three months.
The movie is rewarding and beautiful, but admittedly very slow. The last time I watched it, I didn’t get to the end scene; I was watching it with my boyfriend after a long day, and when he eventually drifted off, I joined him.
We had been sleeping together in his bedroom in Sydney for a couple weeks at that point. We’d been talking about it for a while before, but no one could really believe it was actually happening, us included. The whole time from when I bought my flights to when I boarded the plane (and even after), everyone I talked to about visiting my boyfriend in Australia thought it was fucking crazy. Part of this has to do with the sheer distance involved. Sydney, Australia is really, really far away from Toronto, Canada. The flight is long and expensive, the time zones are very different.
But then there was the other element. Though the time we spent together in person in Toronto was beautiful, and we had been in close contact ever since he left, there was still some uncertainty (at least from others) about whether or not this was the real deal. I told everyone that I was going because I didn’t have any warm weather memories with him; I didn’t have any memories or experiences of his current life; I didn’t have enough shared experiences with him, and I wanted to create them. And I mean, sure, that’s all very romantic. But without a foundation of real knowledge and history, such romanticism comes across as pretty risky. If your best friend tells you that they’re flying to the literal other side of the world for six weeks to sleep next to a guy they’ve only known in person for less than five months just so they can make more memories together, would you take that seriously? Does that sound real? Who were we to one another, really? Honestly, was any of this real?
A digression:
For most North Americans, a place like Sydney, Australia is so far away as to be somewhat out of imagination, so I will describe it for you. It is a city not unlike Vancouver or San Francisco, in that it is built around a jagged coastline and the soul of the city is shaped by its relationship to the Pacific and the routes that cross it. But it is also substantially warmer and greener than those North American cities, and until you drive further out west (to its newer and somewhat purposefully underdeveloped immigrant neighbourhoods), Sydney’s urban flora is unmistakably tropical in a way that is totally foreign to even the lushest spots in continental Anglo-America. In trying to capture the level and variety of greenery in city spaces, I found myself comparing Sydney to Mexico City, which of course is absurd if know both places.
Sydney’s different neighbourhoods have the kind of distinct local identities of neighbourhoods in London, with a similar level of relative infrastructural disconnection compared to the centre. Like London as well, it is not a gridded city, but follows an “organic” plan, which is difficult to navigate but beautiful to experience. However, unlike London, each little area of Sydney (what they call “suburbs”) is visually distinct. On an aesthetic level, you feel that you have entered a new part of the city every 15-30 minutes on foot. But there are still some common uniting features. Like Toronto, Sydney has certain Victorian architectural and design motifs that echo throughout its suburbs. The overall colour palette of the city is closer to the baby blues, soft pinks, warm yellows, and sunny oranges that I saw in Roma or Napoli than the rich browns and cold greys of New York or Toronto. Most of the city was built in the mid or late 19th century, like Montreal, and both cities boast distinctive stylistic themes that repeat from place to place, and are hard to find elsewhere. In Montreal, one element might be those characteristic spiral staircases and upstairs balconies; in Sydney, by contrast, ornate wrought-iron railings and wooden embellishments are common, as are narrow porches, deep lots, and facades with elements painted in bright greens, whites, yellows, and blues. It is a city with lots of stairs, and lots and lots of trees. It is a city where proximity to the shoreline is a noticeable marker of status, baked in from colonial days, and so different communities have entirely different relationships to the ocean based on their relationship to a particular shore. Coming from Toronto, where there is certainly segregation but fewer consistent lines of racial geography, I felt more surrounded by white people in Sydney than at home, though there are entire parts of the city that are only inhabited by immigrant communities. There is also the noticeable absence of certain cultural influences and communities that you encounter daily in many North American cities.
The other main thing to know about Sydney is that it is incredibly beautiful. You can look at basically anything, and everything you see will be beautiful. The city is astonishingly green. It is lush and verdant and thoroughly leafy, with unique tropical species, and those trees and populated by the most vibrant and obnoxious and interesting bird and bat species you have ever seen. Every creature is outsized, and embarrassingly familiar with humans, so that when I jumped at the sound of a bat’s massive wings unfurling, I could see even the bat rolling its eyes at me.
Discovering this new place with my boyfriend, who had spent the last year learning to understand it and love it, was delightful. Though I was afforded plenty of time to go out and explore on my own, like a child, I found myself returning to him for warmth and guidance. He was excited about the patterns he noticed, the history he was learning, the places he found familiar and still new. It was clear that his relocation had marked a new chapter in his life and his self. I met him within months of him making this big change, so though I felt connected to the previous era of his life — and in many ways, helped him send it off and conclude it — this new era was the version of him I knew best. He was eager to talk about this difference; how he might have reacted to the same experience a few years prior, what he would have felt, what he could have said, and how much it all changed. I found myself appreciating everything about him currently, the version of him that he was now inhabiting and showing to me. But I also felt strangely protective of that previous version, the more shy and unsettled one, the one who was not yet sure he could rise to challenge of such a dramatic relocation. I wanted to know him, too. What I already knew of him, I liked.
I won’t belabour the differences between my past and current partner. Even with the best intentions, enumerating differences can take on the flavour of comparison, and I think such an exercise does a disservice to everyone. So let’s just say that they are undeniably very different in many ways. In no real way have I reproduced one in the another, and if I were trying to do so, I would have accepted failure by now. But it is certainly true that there are things that my ex-boyfriend and my current boyfriend share, most of which are the kind of things that I now have to accept that I seem to look for in a partner. For instance, they are both curious and inquisitive people, with a deep interest in diverse and unusual topics and a naturally insatiable appetite for knowledge about the world around them. They both love design and illustration, and dabble in art. They both love women, meaning both the women in their lives and women more generally. They both like to cook and feel at home in a kitchen. They enjoy spending alone time together with others. They both have leftist politics, and approach the realm of the political with a healthy dose of skepticism and humour. They’re both stoners, plant lovers, and very amateur bird-watchers. They are also both Persian. My ex-boyfriend was born in Tehran in 1986. My boyfriend was born in Esfahan in 1998. They are from the same country, and they share the same first language, but they speak it with different accents, they have different cultural references, and they have different relationships to even this big thing that unites them.
My boyfriend has told me that he appreciates that I’ve come to him essentially pre-seasoned. I’m already familiar with his culture, and I’m able to engage with some depth and experience. He doesn’t have to explain anything, and he likes that I have my own opinions and experiences and points of reference. Still, for better or worse, it is also true that this cultural knowledge is filtered almost entirely through my ex-boyfriend. This has proven a bit tricky for me, certainly at the level of my own whiteness and the boundaries that race and power necessarily places on my own proximity or participation in other cultures, but also on the level of someone who, by dint of my ongoing relationships, must still grapple with what it means to engage authentically. When I think of Persian music or food or art, I am inevitably thinking of the things that my ex-boyfriend chose to share with me. His sharing them made them “mine” in a way, as well — though obviously without any claim to ownership.
Still, in confronting my boyfriend’s relationship to these same things (and the things he chooses to share with me in turn), I have had to interrogate my own relationship to them as well, and whatever claims I might have had to them (even at the level of feeling). In other words: What does this song, dish, or memory mean to me, now that I am holding it on my own? It is easy for the initial verb in that sentence to shift to should.
The last time I spoke with my ex-boyfriend directly was while I was in Australia. It was a particularly rainy day in late February, and it was humid and grey in Sydney, about two days after I had first arrived at the end of their warm, wet season, with the air all sticky hot and hazy. I was on a little walk around a point on the city’s north shore, a trail that was a mix of curated bush and designed gardens, and I texted him that he would love this place, because there were so many interesting bird and plant species. I had been thinking this since I arrived, but wasn’t sure if or how to bring it up. But when it started raining, I looked out on the water and thought of Vancouver, with its drizzly Sims City Pacific coast skyline, and I thought about how this is the kind of trip that my ex would love, and the kind of thing that he would love doing, and how I had only learned to love this kind of thing because of him. I meant, but didn’t say, “I wish you were here.” Instead, I meant, and said, “I honestly think you’d like it here. Or at least find it funny in the same ways that I am.”
When you date someone for over six years, especially during such a transformative time in your life (I was 21 when we met and turned 28 two weeks after we broke up), you are inevitably shaped by that person. I think this is probably especially true when your partner is older than you, and therefore inevitably inflects your experiences with the reflection of their own. And so on many occasions, perhaps particularly when traveling — when you are forced out of your ordinary context and must really confront who you are on a more intrinsic level — you have to pose yourself the question:
Who am I without him now?
It’s almost embarrassing how often I still go back and forth on this question. But it is a question that needs to be asked, and one that, by dint of its asking, I am engaged in the practice of finding its answer.
I used to think that what I had with my ex-boyfriend was something I was meant to keep in a special double-walled place, the ark hidden in the temple’s inner sanctuary, only accessible to a select group at select times — not because it was shameful or secret, but simply that it was meant to be ours alone.
I am often forced to confront how much I have been shaped by my previous relationship. I find myself struggling with this idea of having been or become such a full and complex and complete version of myself with one person, and now trying to carry this version of myself forward with another person, and giving this person everything.
Travel forces this out of me, because it disconnects me from place and leaves me with only myself. Last year around this time, in May 2024, I visited the same city and neighbourhood in Spain where we had stayed together on our sixth anniversary trip, two autumns prior. I stopped in a plaza that I remembered us sitting in, me with a beer and him with a cigarette, in front of a church with a funny-looking stained glass window. When I saw that window, I was stopped in my tracks. I sat down on a bench and just cried and cried. I was completely undone. I felt like I was visiting a relic of my previous relationship, like I had made a pilgrimage to the homeland of my grief, and the feeling of loss and love came over me with the zeal and spirit of religious ecstasy. After that experience, I called him and we chatted briefly, and I told him I was grateful, and probably said some other stuff that was stupid and unnecessary, and hung up feeling moved but assured. I made a decision then that I would force myself to trust in having a sense of ownership over my memories; that relationship was ours, yes, but that means that it was also mine. I can be the custodian of my own experiences.
I have to be only person who I can rely on to hold those memories, to share them, to make sense of their meaning. I hope that I am up to the task. And now that I have such a desire to rebuild myself, I want to be able make use of all the bricks that he and I laid together, even if he is not here to carry them. It has taken me a lot of time to feel comfortable with that wanting, and what it requires of me.
But how much can you ever really share an experience? What does it mean to be known?
The scene in Certified Copy (2010) where the conversation shifts from one only about art and authenticity, to one of love and partnership, is set in a cafe in a Tuscan town. The barista mistakenly assumes that the two leads are a married couple. She chats with the female lead in Italian about marriage, and she plays along.
In that same scene, the male lead describes a memory he had of another visit to Italy witnessing a woman and her son, and learns that the woman in the memory is the same woman sitting across from him. Tearfully, she describes her experience of the same memory. It’s a confusing and drawn-out scene, a sort of indulgent deep dive into a shared but disconnected memory of a strange, disconnected experience.
In Melbourne, I told my boyfriend, “I wish you had been there with us,” referring to my previous relationship. It was a strange sentiment, but it came from an honest place. We have not had the benefit of so much time together, so we are always searching for ways to share experiences. It can feel silly sometimes, to go over the same few memories and hold onto them with such affection, relive them in such detail, such careful yet clumsy reconstruction. But I love my boyfriend. And though we have fewer memories together than I would like, for now, I still want to feel with him the terrifying joy and comfort of being known. And so I will make it work, somehow. I will share everything.
I want him to know what I know. I want him to feel what I feel. I want him to have everything good that I have. I have all these experiences of grief and comfort and joy and pleasure and annoyance and frustration and resolution and laughter and intimacy and connection and tenderness and sweetness and exhaustion and love and love and love and love.
The second I saw my boyfriend waiting for me in the Sydney airport parking lot, any question as to the authenticity of this experience completely disappeared. It shone with the warm certainty of a sunset. We were here, we were together. Everything else in the world fell away. This was real, and it was ours to share.
Gorgeous prose as always, Alex, and a treat to read.