Certified Copy evokes and pays tribute to many great films, directors

Obviously many have compared Abbas Kaiarostami's (had to look up his name) Certified Copy (2010) with the new wave films of confused identity and mysterious narration within a seemingly realistic narrative vocabulary, e.g., Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year in Marienbad. In Certified Copy, an English author is delivering a lecture in Tuscany about his new book, in which he argues that copies of great works of art have their own intrinsic value and one might just as well purchase a good copy as an original - the only value the original holds is fetishistic, it's no better in and of itself as a work of art. During his lecture, a 40ish woman, Binoche, enters with her preteen sign, quite disruptively. At her invite, he meets Binoche the next day at her antique store (though she believes they share an interest in antique originals, he says he's not interested in them at all); the decide to spend the day together and drive out to another Tuscan town - it seems like an obvious pickup, but they don't flirt in any obvious way, rather engage in lengthy discussion about art and life, and at this point the movie feels very "European" and obviously evokes Rohmer and perhaps the My Dinner with Andre, a long and oddly adversarial conversation, but in this case between two (apparent) strangers. When they visit a cafe where the owners assume they are a married couple, Binoche begins to play along with this assumption - and she gets the guy, an actor named Shimmel? (playing James Miller) who's very good here and also in a small part in the recent L'Amour and a multilingual artist/intellectual (in both movies) to go along with this - and their pretending to be a squabbling married couple becomes a game and way of being unto itself - leading to tears, to bitter arguments and scenes, including one memorably in an near-empty restaurant: so why are they playing this game? In another evocation, this behavior recalls the bitter role playing of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf - except with this difference: there's a hint that perhaps they're not playing at all, or only partially playing - that they might have a past together - and the play-acting is not occurring in the second half of the film but in the first, when they seem not to know each other (hard as that is to accept realistically). In either case, we know nothing about his back story and little about hers - we don't know who her son's father is and whether either is married and if not why not, as they're both smart and attractive and well off - though Binoche seems and looks a bit nutty and off-kilter. She's great in this multilingual role by the way - and there are some wonderfully odd scenes in this movie, including a visit to a wedding chapel with the newlyweds want Binoche and James  to pose for photographs with them, and a conversation at a fountain with two folks who look down and out but turn out to be great art enthusiasts, and the guy offers sage advice to Miller. These scenes are a tribute of course to the greatest of all Italian directors, wit their odd and oblique humor and unsettling randomness. Need I say who?