The Double Life of Veronique (1991, France/Poland/Norway)
(Director: Krzysztof Kiselowski, Producer: Leonardo De La Fuente, Writers: Krzysztof Kieślowski & Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Actors: Irene Jacob, Philippe Volter, Sandrine Dumas, Aleksander Bardini)
Unnecessary narrative exposition has often frustrated me. It is often the T&C section of story telling, the part where one's eyes roll back towards the innards of the mind as we're told something that we should already know. But in our current cultural moment, didacticism is increasingly necessary, providing clarity that forcefully opposes the obfuscation and confusion favoured by the powerful.
Essays, analysis and speeches have been the source of some of our most moving and urgent communication modes in a world that is constantly fraying and betraying a want for certainty. Strikingly though, some of the most cutting and prescient of our most urgent recent texts resist convenient solutions, occasionally even finding lucidity in our collective lack of clarity.
All of this makes negotiating a narrative film such as Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1991, light-as-a-feather existential dilemma, The Double Life of Veronique, seem maddeningly quaint. The end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union sits at a remove; poetic fodder in one crucial scene, it otherwise doesn’t figure in the film's concerns.
The plot, in so far as it is relevant, focuses on two doppelgangers (both played by Irene Jacob), born from separate parents - one based in Poland (Weronika), the other in France (Veronique) - and their growing awareness of the other's existence, while dealing with their own respective lovers, desires and ambitions to sing. It is barely a spoiler to note that by the film's end, they know only that their paths crossed once; both are unlikely to truly ever know further contact is impossible.
It's a film unmoored from subtext and heavy-handedness. It breaks with the fables and morality plays that categorised Kieslowski's 10-part Dekalog series and its feature length spin-offs, A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love, shifting to more heavily emphasise mood and tone in a way that would again be developed further in his Three Colours trilogy.
Kieslowski and his team of collaborators are working at near optimal levels. Jacob is fantastic, embodying her characters with a deftness and sincerity that prevents them from becoming cyphers. Sławomir Idziak's cinematography elevates the film into the otherworldly, aided by Zbigniew Preisner's score, though it occasionally draws attention to its own operatics in a way that is at odds with the rest of the film's mise en scene.
The first post-credit scene of the film, featuring a choir performing as a downpour of rain arrives, is shorthand for its mysterious magic. The camera holds on Jacob's beaming smile as the rain comes down and the choir finishes. The ecstasy is almost palpable, a feeling of connection just within reach. The first two thirds of the film sustain this otherworldliness; it feels both inscrutably aloof and deeply intimate.
However, as the last act approaches, I begin to feel frustration. The lack of forward movement annoys me, but I don't want to be annoyed. I'm as much frustrated by these thoughts - the film owes me nothing - as I am with the film itself. Kieslowski himself once said his films are entirely free of metaphor, and while it's easy to be cynical about such a claim coming from a man who has gestured towards colours of the French national flag and the Ten Commandments in what are widely perceived as two of his major achievements, this does hold true, at least for Veronique. The mood it conveys doesn’t amount to much of material substance.
The film's final half-an-hour begins to redirect the titular character’s energies elsewhere, translating her melancholia at an inarticulable loss into what seems like both more sustainable and necessarily disappointing understandings. Veronique’s self-belief — in pre-destiny, in some kind of greater connection — gives way instead to a pragmatic self-sufficiency, her ideals lingering like radio static.
"It starts to dissolve, like mist," New York Times critic Vincent Canby observed of the film's final quarter, "so that by the time it is actually over the screen seems to have been blank for some time."
Canby's frustration misses the point, but also hits on the mysteriousness that characterises the film's entirety, and more obviously, the meaninglessness of its plot to the experience of the film. If Veronique is about any kind of double life, it's certainly not a figurative or literal one, only its possibility. It plays with, rather than develops this imagery: A late comment from Veronique's lover (Philippe Volter), a writer and puppeteer, about two puppets baring her resemblance, is a tease from Kiselowski, before his final coda flips the script on the audience once more: Veronique's father also senses her presence.
Although Canby reviewed the film at the time of its release, perhaps viewing the film from any kind of contemporary prism is the problem. Where a media studies degree seems barely sufficient to parse the overwhelming amount of information available to us, watching a film with an obvious mystery it is unwilling to articulate feels like a blatant troll, though there is also an obvious irony to this: A text with answers is different from the act of solving a problem.
Part of the answer Veronique provides for its titular heroine involves Veronique’s love interest sending mysterious found sound tapes to her home address in the hopes of provoking a response for a book he's writing. Predictably, when they finally meet, they quarrel and then fall in love.
But why does this demonstrably stupid portion of the film, the one thing about it that feels dated and false, frustrate me less than the film's non-willingness to elucidate its central question?
Other than the aforementioned romantic sub-plot, I’m jealous of its achievement, frankly.
It doesn't need to articulate what it is and where it has come from; it tells its story confidently while preserving the integrity of its central mechanism. You could call that mechanism a MacGuffin, but that would undersell its metaphysical connotations. It withholds so as to emphasise an abundance of possibilities, that we can each keep to ourselves.
My favourite moment in the film comes about ten minutes in. While Weronika travels to Krakow we see a landscape that looks likes it is literally splitting in two. It lasts a for a few seconds, but the secrets of the universe are within our grasp, and as with many parts of the film, the green tint accentuates the sheer beauty of the moment.
The camera zooms back, we're on a train.
It keeps zooming back: We were looking through the viewing sphere of a bouncy ball for the entirety of the shot.
The film keeps going.
I think I've found my answer.
Five Things
Other stuff I think you should check out:
“Certainty is something that can mislead you just as much as you solidify a path forward: An Interview with Jia Tolentino by Cher Tan" (Article, The Lifted Brow)
“Getting Warmer with Jen Monroe - Robbie Basho Special” (Mix, NTS)
“Watchmen” (TV/Streaming, HBO/Foxtel Now)
“Myths 004 EP by Cate Le Bon and Bradford Cox” (Music, Mexican Summer)
“Longform Podcast #366 — Ashley Feinberg” (Podcast, Longform)
Next Time (17/11)
I’ll be looking at Big Thief’s 2019 releases U.F.O.F. and Two Hands.