Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique is more of a fascination for me than anything else. I would certainly never go to the lengths Roger Ebert has in expressing his love for it, listing it as one of his great movies just as he does Kieslowski’s The Decalogue and Three Colors trilogy.
That said, Criterion’s recent Blu-ray release of The Double Life of Veronique is a virtual no-brainer, not in terms of your need to purchase it, but because it’s a visual marvel. Slawomir Idziak’s cinematography is a thing of beauty and is likely the reason the film resonates with viewers above anything else. In high definition his yellowish-green filters looks marvelous. The release also comes with a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack that soars as it needs to. Veronique is just as much an aural film as it is a visual one, playing with the ideas of feelings and emotion all set to an operatic musical template.
The story here centers on two women, both named Veronique and both played with an air of innocent sensuality by Irene Jacob. One lives in Poland as a singer, the other in Paris as a music teacher. Scenes, circumstances, happy accidents and unexplained coincidences play out. Some have little or nothing to do with the other, others build a very specific connection. What does it all mean?
Kieslowski does very little to tell the audience what is going on as much as he trusts you’ll understand what is going on and if you don’t it’s a matter of accepting the unknown.
It is this acceptance of the unknown that will enrapture some, frustrate others and will merely be accepted by the rest. This is a film you can watch over and over again, looking for clues, some more visible than others and some that play heavily on filmmaking techniques such as a character’s reflection or the picture’s musical cues. I found myself searching for a few answers in the supplemental material, others in conversations online and as I did, most of it didn’t add up to much more than I had already taken away.
With Veronique, Kieslowski shows us only what he felt we needed to see. While watching the supplemental features you can see him and his editor discussing a scene in which he tells him a specific scene works just as it is, but he wants to cut the fat to the point he gives the audience no more than is necessary. This is a technique that will keep people coming back, looking for more and sorting out what bewildered them the first time. This, as opposed to watching a film once and shelving it. If Veronique gets hold of you, I can only assume you’ll be back for more.
As for me, in the process of reviewing this film I watched it about one-and-a-half times and then again to listen to Annette Insdorf’s commentary and feel I’ve had my fill. The only questions I have that remain weren’t answered anywhere on this disc or anywhere online that I could find. The one question I really want the answer to is just how exactly Kieslowski and Idziak shot the diner scene with Veronique and Alexandre near the end as it appeared there was a plate of glass between the two actors as strange reflections and almost a ghosting of the image on the screen shows up several times. The film plays on the idea of mirrors and reflections plenty, but I can’t quite seem to get a grasp on the meaning in this particular instance.
As for the rest of the features, the 2005 documentary “1966-1988: Kieslowski, Polish Filmmaker” is a decent primer before heading into the far deeper 1991 documentary “Kieslowski’s Dialogue” which basically expands on all the ideas the former sort of traces over. There are also four short documentary films, three by Kieslowski and one by his teacher Kazimierz Karabasz.
Finally there are three interviews (the oldest being from 2005), one with actress Irene Jacob who stars as both versions of Veronique in the film, another with Idziak and one other with composer Zbigniew Preisner, which is to say the interviews here are new and up-to-date as of 2006 when the film was first released on Criterion DVD.
Finally, it comes equipped with an impressive 44-page booklet with an essay by Jonathan Romney and a selection from “Kieslowski on Kieslowski”. This is a smaller booklet than the one that came with the DVD, which also included essays by Slavoj Zizek and Peter Cowie, but both of those, along with the Romney essay, can be read at Criterion’s website right here.
I’m not sure when, or if, I’ll return to this film. I found myself more fascinated by the films (particularly Red) that made up Three Colors and I am more interested now in watching The Decalogue, but as far as this film goes I’m not sure I got as much out of it as others have.
