THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE, 1991, France / Norway / Poland, 98 min.
(Subtitled)
Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006
Selected Recognitions: Best Actress (Irène Jacob), FIPRESCI Prize, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and nominated for the golden Palm, Cannes, 1991; Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, Golden Globes, 1992; Audience Award, Warsaw, 1991
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Director(s): Krzysztof Kieslowski
One of the most celebrated works from the late, great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, this classic explores the idea that each of us is matched somewhere in the world, by our exact double - someone who shares our thoughts and dreams. Here, the luminous and spell-binding Irène Jacob plays two women who not only look alike, but whose lives and emotions seem to be entwined on planes beyond the merely physical. They are, and yet are not, identical.
As the film opens, Polish Weronika has given up her career as a pianist, due to an accident, and is visiting her aunt in Krakow to promote a new career in singing. Cut to a tour bus from France passing through the Krakow central square. Looking up, Weronika is drawn to Véronique, whom she recognizes in that moment as her exact double. Véronique, however doesn’t register Weronika, By chance, Weronika wins a place in a famous choir, but as she is singing she collapses on the stage…. Cut back to Paris where Véronique is contentedly making love. Suddenly, however, she feels a bolt of sadness, a pervasive sense that something is missing and that she is out of place with the universe. As a result of this experience, Véronique decides to give up her own plans for a professional career in music to become a teacher – and finds herself teaching her class the same choral music that Weronika sung. Then she has another chance meeting, this time with a man, Alexandre. Clues begin to arrive connecting the three of them together and the narrative morphs again, this time into an emotional jigsaw puzzle, which Kieslowski typically asks us to enter without worrying too much about where he is taking us.
This film suggests mysterious connections of personality and emotion, but with no precise narrative. Interestingly, we understand that Kieslowski's original idea was to create several slightly different versions of the film, to play in different theaters. If a viewer saw Véronique twice at different places, the story might change like a favorite bedtime story in which a phrase is altered or a scene added or dropped with each telling. There would be no "right" way to see the film. The idea was too impractical and expensive to be more than a thought, but the notion suggests the best way to approach this enigmatic story. And, on its own poetic terms, this film does work.
Notes: 2 discs, Criterion Collection
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