La Double Vie de Véronique (1991)
(The Double Life of Veronique)
directed by Krzysztof KieslowskiFrames in this review are taken from the Criterion Collection DVD.
To reduce confusion, or at least to remain consistent, I will use:
- Weronika to refer to the Polish girl
- Véronique to refer to the French girl
- Veronique (no accent) as shorthand for the film as a whole.
France has long served as a haven for Polish expatriates: Frédéric Chopin in music, Marie Curie in chemistry, and Krzysztof Kieslowski in film. Indeed, Kieslowski would pay tribute to two centuries of Franco-Polish friendship in his Three Colors trilogy: Blue, White, and Red, from the three colors of the French flag. Despite the grand conception of the trilogy, the individual films in the trilogy remain intimate, focusing on the personal connection made between two people.
The Double Life of Veronique goes farther. The two people here are connected in a far deeper way, for they are two instances of the same young woman: Weronika in Poland, and Véronique in France. Both are played by French actress Irène Jacob. (Duality is a common theme in Kieslowski films: the posthumously-produced Heaven would follow two unrelated near-twins, but one male and one female.)
In Krakow, the Polish Weronika auditions to sing with an orchestra. Despite her lack of formal training, she performs so brilliantly at the audition that she is selected for the position. However, she has a serious heart condition, and drops dead during her first concert after literally singing her heart out. Hundreds of miles away, the French Véronique is experiencing a different kind of death, la petite mort of orgasm. Afterwards, she feels a profound sensation of loneliness, as though she had lost someone. The next day, she abruptly ends her singing lessons, to the distress of her tutor. In class the next day, she has her elementary-school students play the same concerto that Weronika was singing as she died, a long-lost piece by the (fictional) Dutch composer Van den Budenmeyer.
Véronique had once taken a photo of Weronika as her tour bus was speeding away from a riot in Warsaw, but Véronique is unaware of Weronika's existence until the photos are developed (in typical Kieslowski fashion, they're black-and-white on a contact sheet; compare to Irène Jacob's fashion shoot in Three Colors: Red). After seeing a puppet show, she connects to the puppeteer in a roundabout way. She receives a puppet string in the mail, then a cassette tape with various background sounds; she tracks the origin to a café at a Paris train station. The puppeteer tells her of a play that he is writing about two identical girls. One of them burned her hand on a stove, and the other one pulled her hand away at the last minute, as though forewarned. "Why two?" she asks. "They're fragile," he says, "They break."There are many parallels in the film, from the little glass ball that both Veronicas have, to the kind widower fathers, to the headphones they wear while listening to tapes to shut out the world. But the connections do not exist merely at the circumstantial level. Both Veronicas have a curiosity about the world: as toddlers, one looks at the stars while the other looks at the leaves. Both are perceptive about their surroundings, taking simple pleasure in everyday activities like exhaling to fog up a window on a cold winter's day. Both are impulsive and quick to fall in love. And yet, there is a key difference between the two young women. Weronika is eager and vivacious — on the phone to her friend in Krakow, as Communism is collapsing around Eastern Europe, she playfully whistles the Internationale. Véronique, on the other hand, is drifting along and searching for meaning — one of her friends is in the middle of a messy divorce and is looking for ammunition; she volunteers to testify that she had slept with the stranged husband 17 times in the past year. When she finds the puppeteer in the café, she is distraught at the idea that he had only been toying with her.
Kieslowski is a consummate auteur, and explores similar themes in many of his films. Identity, of course; the transformative power of music; and the ironic twists of morality in interpersonal relations. What is the significance of the divorce case, or of the old woman in the street? In a Kieslowski film they are not necessarily significant by themselves, because it is the impact of these ideas and images, taken just as they are, that make the film. It's not like one of those overly-clever flashback-laden or out-of-sequence American whodunits that so delight the college crowd, where every piece has to fit into a jigsaw to produce a tableau at the end. Here, there are loose odds and ends; indeed, every viewer may fit together his own connections (and accuse others of overanalyzing the film!).
Still, Veronique is much harder to grasp than the more plot-heavy Three Colors trilogy or Heaven, which are more concrete andaccessible than Veronique. There is great dependence on precise images to make a point — little nuances of facial expressions, the warm and moody lighting. Kieslowski is very careful about composition and editing; a very enlightening featurette on one of the Three Colors DVDs has him explaining how carefully a short shot of a sugar cube dissolving in coffee was planned. Any shorter and the shot would be too short; any longer than it would be too long. The Double Life of Veronique is a carefully-crafted apparition upon which the viewer can impose his own framework.
