Set in Tuscany, the film focuses on a British writer (William Shimell) and a French antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche), whose relationship undergoes an odd transformation over the course of a day.

During the conversation, which at times becomes very strained, Miller points out that even the Mona Lisa is a 'copy' of the woman who modeled for the painting, real or imagined.

The woman takes Miller to an art museum to see another famous 'copy,' but he is uninterested, saying that he has already finished work on the book and is not interested in further examples.

She expresses unhappiness over their 15th wedding anniversary the previous night, during which he fell asleep while she was getting ready in the bathroom, and tells him his constant traveling for work has made him emotionally distant.

As Miller and his wife walk away, he places his hand on her shoulder; when they go into a restaurant, she goes to the bathroom and applies lipstick and puts on earrings.

"The film started to build according to the story that I was telling, but also according to my knowledge of her as a woman with her vulnerability, with her sensitivity, with what I knew about her soul, about her relationship with her children.

[7] At some point Robert De Niro was in negotiation for the role, but eventually it was offered to William Shimell, a baritone opera singer who had never acted in a film before.

[14] The film opened in 101 venues and had an attendance of 70,876 the first week, resulting in a ninth place on the French box office chart.

[15][16] After the theatrical run's second week, the number of screens had been increased to 147 and the film climbed one position on the chart, with a total attendance of 151,152.

Jamal Shourjeh from the ministry's Cinematic Department explained: "Certified Copy has been produced by a non-Iranian in Italy in western culture; therefore, it should have a license for national screening".

"Through strokes of chased dialogue and close-ups, Abbas Kiarostami achieves a universal film, between levity and drama, about the feelings that are diluted over time", wrote Renaud Baronian in Le Parisien.

"[26] Emmanuèle Frois of Le Figaro wrote: "Inspired by Roberto Rossellini, Abbas Kiarostami signs his own Journey to Italy without plagiarizing the original."

Frois noted how believable she found the couple with their "desires, disappointments, misunderstandings, hopes", and how the narrative alternates between drama and comedy, "like in life.

The website's critical consensus reads, "The main stars are absolutely perfect in this absorbing, existential drama that dissects human relationships.

Bradshaw rated the film with two stars out of five and said that it sometimes looks like "the work of a highly intelligent and observant space alien who still has not quite grasped how Earthlings actually relate to each other.

"[31] David Denby of The New Yorker called the film "fascinating, beautiful, and intentionally enraging: a brilliant return to form from a director whose work, in the past, has joined modernist game-playing to ethical propriety and modesty."

In a review of Kiarostami's next film, Like Someone in Love, Denby further described Certified Copy as "nearly perverse in its ambiguity... an intricately conjoined double fiction, each tale uneasily reverberating inside its linked opposite.

[33] Keith Uhlich of Time Out New York named Certified Copy the best film of 2011, calling it Kiarostami's strongest work.