The Double Life Of Véronique (1991)

“Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski

Some films are completely blissful and ethereal, their souls float through the environment, their images fade between dreamy and fleeting sensations, their substance is destined to overcome the borders of time and space. There are some films that, no matter how often they are seen, always leave a new flavor that penetrates your emotional depths. The Double life of Véronique by Krzysztof Kieślowski is one of them. It might also be the one that reflects best the sensitive, metaphysical and poetic spirit of the Polish auteur. Sublime works like Decalogue (1998) and The Three Colour Trilogy (1993-1994) show us that Kieślowski has always been interested in the inner truth of man and his longing for freedom, an intimate terrain he approaches with surgical delicacy and sensitivity. In The Double life of Véronique, life is represented as a strange result of freedom and coincidences. A big confluence of multiple factors create an individual feeling which is fueled by the complex crossroads that life presents us.

The Double Life Of Véronique intertwines the lives of two physically identical women (both played by Irène Jacob). They are motherless, lonely and deep music lovers that share the same heart disease but are otherwise opposite personalities. Weronika lives in Poland and has a brilliant career as a soprano singer. In France, more than a thousand kilometers away, lives Véronique, a music teacher who shares many vital similarities with Weronika. Weronika gives herself to music as her only goal in life, while Véronique gives herself to love in all aspects and forms. This is the clearest difference between the two women. It seems as if both were similar in body and soul, despite having different life strategies and goals. Without knowing anything about each other or maintaining any kind of relationship, they seem to be connected. Both women represent the myth of the doppelgänger, which says that every living being has, somewhere, a double of identical appearance and opposite personality.

Weronika tells others about a strange and uneasy feeling that constantly haunts her. This sensation is reinforced when she catches a glimpse of a French tourist (Véronique) taking photos of protestors in the center of Kraków, Poland. Afterwards, Weronika’s astonishing singing voice enables her to win a competition to join a musical company. As she begins to perform her first concert, the heart disease sadly prevents her from continuing and the film quickly shifts the attention to Véronique.

As we first see Véronique, she is in the middle of making love but suddenly breaks into tears with no explanation. This incident occurs in the very same moment when Weronika suffers a heart attack at her concert in Kraków. We soon learn that Véronique has given up a promising singing career because it seems “wrong for her”, and that’s why she decided to become a music teacher of young children. During this same period, she schedules an electrocardiogram, as if she has had some kind of warning, an unexplained sense of loss. Suddenly, she receives enigmatic packages in the mail from Alexandre (Philippe Volter), a puppeteer and children’s book author who gives a performance at the school where Véronique teaches. He sends Véronique a cassette tape that contains a fragment of Zbigniew Preisner‘s Van Den Budenmayer Concerto In Mi Mineur Version De 1798 (Sbi 152), the ethereal choir that her Polish doppelgänger interpreted when she suffered her heart attack. Alexandre’s goal is to help Véronique on her journey to know herself better. We will never know how Alexandre got that tape, in the same way that we won’t find an explanation for Véronique’s enigmatic and transcendent connection to another person.

At one point, Véronique says, “All my life I’ve felt like I was here and somewhere else at the same time”. Life works this way for many people. We see the ideal self and what we could be fully capable of doing, and then we are drawn back into the reality of where we actually are. The confusion and sadness of not knowing yourself can be seen in both women’s stories, and the joy in discovering something new has an equally powerful impact. Some people would see a depiction of what Jung called synchronicity, which refers to two different but identical phenomena, connected not only by its properties but also its inherent meaning. Others would call it apophenia, which is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Many would at least see an incredibly enigmatic and beautiful film, which is the least one can say. Kieślowski worked closely with the photographer Slawomir Idziak, the screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and the composer Zbigniew Preisner. They created a cinematic web of melancholy where stinging, drawn-out emotions symphonically turned into dramatic heart attacks.

by Octavio Carbajal González