Third place:
Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia [142/24]
Second place:
Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene [145/22]
And your winner...
Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy [148/24]
"Juliette Binoche first appears so unobtrusively in Certified Copy that you might not even notice her right away, standing in the background at a lecture by author James Miller (William Shimell). Binoche’s unnamed character slowly makes her way to the front of the room, walking toward the camera and sitting down in the front row of the crowd. Director Abbas Kiarostami then proceeds to train his camera on Binoche’s face for much of the rest of the film, and that image is never less than captivating. Even in her first moments, before we know anything about her character, Binoche gives hints of the ambiguous relationship between her character and James, flashing a little smile as she sneaks out of the lecture hall to attend to her son, indicating either intrigue or familiarity with the man she’s briefly heard speak.The ambiguity and fluidity of that central relationship is key to the rest of the movie, and Binoche embodies that uncertainty with grace -- constantly on edge and shifting emotions sometimes from one extreme to another within the same moment. And yet the character never seems inconsistent or poorly drawn. Binoche conveys the difficult, conflicted inner life of her character with a simple smile or glance; she seems on the verge of tears as she merely asks James where they’re headed on their day trip, and her eyes indicate the panic of an impending emotional breakdown even as she grins widely while listening to him speak.
While both characters undergo subtle shifts over the course of the movie, Shimell plays James as more aloof and even-keeled, and thus Binoche carries the weight of their relationship. Kiarostami favors long takes that face Binoche head on, and she never flinches, never hides from the audience’s gaze. In turn, we never want to look away, never want to miss a second of those thoughts and emotions that constantly cross her face. Even as we’re disoriented by the mysterious nature of the couple’s relationship, we feel the desperation as she tries to prove an esoteric point about art, or her sadness as she listens to a story about a woman in Florence that somehow becomes about her. “I wasn’t well in those days,” she tells James during his story about the woman in Florence, and although the dialogue never offers an explanation for what she means, Binoche’s performance says all that we need to know." - Josh Bell
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