THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE

by Kevin Koehler

There are two women at the center of The Double Life of Veronique and they are both played by Irene Jacob. Veronique is a French music teacher, Weronika is a Polish singer. They have the same hair cut, wear similar clothes, use lip balm, and even share a heart condition. There are other similarities about their lives, but what’s more notable are their differences. Weronika first becomes aware of her French counterpart in Krakow Square, where she watches her snap photos of a political demonstration before the doppelganger is whisked away by a tourist bus. One might be inclined to think they are the same woman, but they are not, as much as we are defined not by who we are but what we do.

Some are better at doing than others. We first meet Weronika as she is "doing," so to speak: she sings with a chorus of others when rain begins to fall. While others run for cover, she holds her note, turning her face up to the sky. Soaked, she meets a man afterwards in a covered alleyway. They make love. Despite her lack of formal music training (or perhaps because of), Weronika is later discovered by a prestigious music company. She is, as they say, going places, except she isn't - her story is cut short in a manner I will keep to myself. Weronika remains, for the most part (like the film), a beautiful mystery.

While Weronika (the artist) is a person who does or simply is, Veronique (the teacher, the critic) analyzes, deconstructs, and covets. It's not by accident that we first saw her taking those photographs, indeed taking one of Weronika, the woman she would want to be if she knew her (Veronique teaches her students the songs that Weronika sings). The next time we meet her is also as she makes love, an act interrupted when Veronique strangely begins to cry. "Are you sad?" her lover asks. "I don't know why. It's as if I were grieving." She does grieve, in the way that people grieve for themselves and the lives they do not live.

While at a marionette show (one that tells a story of death and rebirth much paralleling her own). Veronique becomes infatuated with the charismatic puppeteer, so much so that she misses much of the performance. The puppeteer engages her (like our director, Kryzysztof Kieslowski, engages us) in a mystery of sorts, sending Veronique mundane household items through the post, items that hold significance in the popular children's books he has written. She turns them over in her hands, staring at them with rapt fascination, marveling perhaps at how the artist can give meaning to something as banal as a piece of shoelace or an empty cigar box. Perhaps it's envy of the artist, the god-like giver of life. Or maybe Veronique is simply happy to have some element of mystical and irrational romance in her life.

The Double Life of Veronique has been called a "metaphysical mystery," not incorrectly, though what mystery there is does not have resolution. Like many of Kieslowski's great films, Veronique is about questions not answers, journeys not destinations. Doing not deconstructing. We are constantly asked, begged, to discard our laziness and see the world from varying perspectives - upside down, through smoke and colored glass, even from behind spectacles or a magnifying lens (I'd be remiss if I did not mention how gorgeously photographed this film is by cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, who also shot Black Hawk Down). There are other worlds besides the one we think we see, ones that might have been and still could be, and in these worlds we can be the people whom we hoped we would.

Interesting footnote: Kieslowski was a juror at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, where Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape took the Palme d'Or. He originally imagined that film's actress Andie McDowell as the lead in Veronique but later changed his mind.

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