Monthly Review :The Double Life Of Veronique (1991)

HAVE YOU EVER felt like you have a double in the world? Have people seemed to recognize you, or have you ever lapsed into easy, intimate conversation with a stranger? How did that feel? How would you translate it to the screen? “The Double life of Veronique “presents this typically Kieslowski-an situation of parallel lives, allowing us to experience the elements of connection, chance and fate that direct our lives.




Synopsis:

Weronika, a sensual Polish choir girl with her head in the clouds and her feet in the wet puddles of Krakow. Weronika unsuccessfully explains to her father the feeling that she is not alone in the world. We later learn of Veronique, a French woman with uncanny parallels to Weronika. The two look identical and share (almost) unique personal mannerisms, yet are distinctly different. Their intuitive bond shapes them both, and leads Veronique to a deeper understanding of love and life.

Review:

The Double Life Of Veronique is a film about taking heed of the world around you as well as the messages that find their way to you through dreams & insights of spirit.The story begins in Poland, where we find the adolescent Veronika singing opera with her school choir. After getting caught in a rainstorm she goes home and makes love to her older boyfriend... so already we have themes of sex, music and the passage into womanhood, three very important factors that will resurface throughout the course of the film.

The film also explores how our lives are affected by more than we can ever understand and how we affect others the same way, it is a call for care for ourselves and our fellows. It creates a kind of continuity between the example of the life lived by Weronika and the changes that Veronique is motivated to make. This quality of continuity is emphasised through the use of circular images and reflections and we are often shown views of the world through windows or objects like a glass marble. The story itself delights in chance and mystical motivation, inserting images from Weronikas life into Veroniques dreams and using daring juxtaposition.

Though The Double Life of Véronique revels in the unexplained, it's never pretentiously obtuse. The master's touch that Krzysztof Kieslowski gives to the film is to invoke our power of intuition. He is an expert at showing us in a way that makes us feel the events rather than intellectualize them. The final shots of The Double Life of Véronique are only a couple of snatched, silent moments. It doesn't put the entire picture into a little box and hand it back to us, telling us everything that the story meant, but yet we somehow walk away with a full sense of those things anyway. It's an experience you never forget

Kieslowski summarised the message of his film to be "to live carefully".Attempting to define La Double Vie de Véronique down to any single understandable reading however is not recommended and probably impossible – and you should distrust anyone who attempts to provide a commentary to “explain” this film. This is not a film to be rationalised, but simply felt. Every single scene in Kieslowski’s films is designed to provoke a response in the viewer, but that response is not predefined or predetermined. The director knows there are as many ways to view the film as there are people to watch it and La Double Vie de Véronique consequently touches people in an indefinable and deeply personal way.

Shot half in Polish and half in French, Véronique occupies a unique position in Kieslowski’s career, straddling the director’s early Polish work, where in films like Blind Chance, No End and his groundbreaking Dekalog series, he explored various themes of chance, fate, freewill that draw people together and the social, moral and political circumstances that bind them together– and leading towards his later French work in the films of The Three Colours Trilogy, where he reworked many of those themes, refining his complex ideas and filmmaking techniques to a remarkable level of precision. In between those two periods of Kieslowski’s tragically brief filmmaking career lies La Double Vie de Véronique, and it sees the director at his most challenging, demonstrating the rigour and attention to detail that we would come to expect from his later films.


Irène Jacob is luminous in the picture. She and Kieslowski were amazing for each other. Just like other famous actor/director couplings like Gong Li &Zhang Yimou, Godard&Anna karanena ,Fellini&Giulietta Masina or even De Niro &Scorsese, they draw performances out of each other that no one else can get. As both versions of Véronique, Jacob manages to make them distinctive while giving the two women enough crossover to make it clear they are of the same spirit. It extends beyond the simple change of hairstyle or langauge. It's in how she emotes, how she carries herself.She has an uncanny openness and vulnerability to the camera. She's beautiful, but in a completely unconventional way, and she has such changeable features that our interest is never exhausted. What's remarkable about her performance is how quiet it is; as an actress, she seems to work almost off the decibel scale. And yet she is remarkably alive on screen, remarkably present. She's a rare combination -- a sexy yet soulful actress.


Photographed quite distinctively by Slawomir Idziak, Kieslowski’s DoP on A Short Film About Killing and Three Colours Blue (and subsequently on films as visually striking as Black Hawk Down), La Double Vie de Véronique has a beautifully composed and stylised look, dominated by golden glows and luminous greens in which red is the only colour that stands out.The use of yellow-green filters gives the film a unified air of mystery and spiritual warmth. Images are nothing without sound to complement them. Zbigniew Preisner's score can only be described as haunting. (Well, "mesmerising" works too I suppose.) If you don't love music, you will after th is. Describing music is even more futile than describing cinematography.

Conclusion:

The Double Life of Véronique is why I watch movies. It is once in a lifetime movie going experience. This is a film you must watch alone. Why alone? Perhaps this is odd to say but the loneliness that haunts this film is surprisingly comforting. Only Kieslowski, the magician knows what he intended for the viewer when he made this. For the true answer, go ahead and drift into the unique world that this film offers and allow yourself to be a part of CINEMA'S GREATEST LULLABY.


Title : La double vie de Véronique (1991)

Country :France / Poland

Language :French /Polish

Cast: Irène Jacob ,Aleksander Bardini,Philippe Volter ,Sandrine Dumas

Rated R for sexuality and nudity

DVD Features :Commentary by film scholar Annette Insdorf
Three short documentary films by Kieslowski
Interview with actress Irène Jacob ,cinematographer Slawomir Idziak ,composer Zbigniew Preisner
Documentary on Kieslowski

Trailer Link :www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihZ1TB9KzGQ

Torrent File Name:The Double Life of Veronique *1991* [DVDRip.XviD-FRAGMENT]