Set in a small Tuscan town where James Miller, a celebrated English writer, is launching his latest philosophical tome, which attracts the attention of a highly interested (unnamed) woman who is desperate to discuss his work further. He has a few hours to spare before he needs to catch his train, so agrees to meet with her and picks her up at her Gallery where she sells reproductions of antiques. And then throughout the new few hours they spend together they enter into an intense dialogue on the nature of copies and originals in art, and in life too.
Written and directed by Abbas Kairostami an award winning Iranian filmmaker, this is his first European movie, which may be a telling factor in why it so fails to work. The book that is the centre of all the heated discussion proposes that copies are every bit as good as the ‘real thing’. This movie is by no means a copy, but as a piece of art and an entertainment, it fails to be the real thing too.
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