The Double Life of Véronique

Judged on structure. The Polish half resists the subtractive test almost completely: the singing in the rain, the heart that tightens at the audition, the crossing of the Kraków square where Weronika sees a French girl boarding a tour bus, the concert and the fall. Each is required, because the second half will be read by the first. The death is the hinge, and the burial seen from within the grave is its seal. In France the structure loosens. Véronique’s giving up of her singing is required, the one act by which the dead girl’s warning passes to the living one, and the puppet show is required. What gives is the clue-trail: the shoelace in the post, the cassette of station sounds, the café at Saint-Lazare, the hotel. It is the author’s method made visible, which keeps the charge small, but it makes its point at length, by a mechanism of pursuit the argument permits rather than compels, and a shorter, harder second half is imaginable.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: a life may be steered by another life it never knows, and what passes between them arrives as feeling, not knowledge. The film shows this through image and sound, and that is credited in full: a ring drawn under the eye by both women, the same music crossing both halves, the photograph in which Véronique finds the face she had felt. A second truth concerns art: Alexandre draws her across France to see whether a woman would follow, for a book, and the artist’s love of a life and his use of it are one act. What holds the axis below the eights is the kind of truth it is. The central disclosure is an intimation, that we are accompanied and inherit what we never knew, not a condition that holds when stated and tested; the film prefers the mood of correspondence to its meaning; and the truth about the artist is made in a few strokes and left there.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Elevation is frequent and comes in two registers. Weronika singing in the downpour as the choir scatters; her voice rising in the concert, Preisner’s setting climbing until her heart fails and she falls, the camera falling with her; the burial seen from below as earth is thrown onto the lens. In France the puppet show is the summit of the half: a ballerina marionette dances, breaks, dies, is wrapped, and rises again with wings, while the children’s faces and Véronique’s are cut against it, a child’s entertainment that is also a death and a resurrection. Smaller heights keep the line up: the transparent ball with its stars through which Weronika watches the countryside turn over from a train, a point of reflected light wandering over Véronique’s room. What holds it below the top: the clue-trail and the hotel run level for some minutes, and some of the lift is bought by Idziak’s golden filters rather than earned by the drama.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The archetype is the double, and it is built, not cited: the whole film is two halves for two women, one dying so that the other lives. The Romantic doppelgänger, in Hoffmann, Poe and Dostoevsky’s The Double, is a figure of dread whose meeting is death; here the double is a guardian whose death is a warning, which is the older matter of the shared soul and the twin who dies for the twin. A second myth is enacted inside the film: the puppeteer as maker of lives, who stages a death and a winged rising, and who at the end shows Véronique two identical marionettes of herself, one kept because handling wears them out. The particular stays particular: a Kraków choir, a French schoolroom, a cassette tape. What holds it below the bar is the withholding. The myth is left deliberately unarticulated, and the metaphysics, load-bearing for the structure, is never given a body as the told myth of a tree or a temple would be; a myth withheld by design is harder to call built.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is threefold: the doppelgänger tale and its cinema of the uncanny double, in Vertigo and Persona; the Polish cinema of moral concern, documentary in method, from which Kieślowski came; and his own work, Blind Chance (made 1981, released 1987), which had already split one life into branches, and Dekalog (1988). The turn is real. Against the uncanny, the double consoles and never meets its other. Against his own realism, the film is lyric and metaphysical, built on intuition and correspondence, with almost no plot in the ordinary sense, and it kills its first protagonist early to begin again with the same face. The stake was his name as a director of moral and social exactness, put on his first largely French production. What holds it below the bar is precedent: killing the protagonist early and going on was Hitchcock’s move in Psycho (1960), the branching life was Kieślowski’s own already, and the lyric European art film had a path proved before him.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The diptych is the instrument: the viewer watches Weronika live and die, and then watches Véronique with knowledge she does not have. What she can only feel, the viewer holds as fact, and the gap between her intuition and the viewer’s knowledge is the film’s subject made into its structure. Told in parallel and cross-cut, the two would become a puzzle; told with an explanation, the knowledge would become a plot. The look binds the halves into one world: Idziak’s golden and green filters hold Kraków and France in the same light, and the music crosses from the dead to the living. At the end the puppeteer’s two marionettes put the form into the story. What holds it below the top: the French half borrows a mystery’s grammar, clues, a tape, a meeting, that the form did not need.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Thirty-five years of return are evidence of a short kind. The questions stay open and argued: what joins the two women, and whether anything does beyond the viewer’s eye; whether Alexandre is lover, author or exploiter, and whether the film’s own author is indicted with him; whether the halves are an allegory of Poland and France, of a Europe divided in 1990, the Polish girl dying of her gift and the French one living by renouncing it. The film has been taken into serious writing on Kieślowski, among it Slavoj Žižek’s book on him (2001), and into writing on film and metaphysics. Formally it yields on return, in the rhymes of ball, glass, string and gesture, and in the music, which carries the plot. What holds it: much of what brings viewers back is texture and mood, the light, the music, the face, which renews less than a question does, and the span is short.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Released in 1991, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force: the film made a European art cinema of intuition and correspondence, carried by colour, music and a single performance across two lives, and showed that a film could hold an audience on a relation it never explains. It perfected a lyric mode more than it reorganised what cinema could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the direct line is Kieślowski’s own Three Colours (1993 to 1994), made with the same writer, photographer and composer and in the same mode; the film’s look and Preisner’s score became a reference for the metaphysical European art film of the decade; and Jacob’s double performance is a standard of its kind. What holds the axis low is that reach running chiefly through its maker’s next films is narrower than reach that redirects others; beyond that line it is diffuse and hard to show, and it lies mostly within art cinema.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-five years. The form survives whole in the European release; a restored edition circulates, and restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous: repertory exhibition, home video, a standard edition on disc, a place in the teaching of European cinema, and Preisner’s music heard apart from the film. That presence has stayed largely within art cinema and has not reached the common reference of the widest films of its decade. The surface dates little: Kraków in 1990 is caught in passing, a demonstration crossed rather than explained, and nothing in the French half is fixed to its year beyond its cassette tapes. Presence continuous but narrower than the widest sets it at the foot of the step for its age, at the bar and no higher.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the medium, and the making is load-bearing. Idziak’s photography carries the film: amber and green filters, a world seen as through warm glass, faces lit from below and from within, the inverted landscape in the ball. Preisner’s score does more than accompany: the concert piece is the instrument of Weronika’s death, and the same music returns as the thread Véronique follows, so that music carries the plot as a story element. Jacob distinguishes two women by small means, a quickness in one and a guardedness in the other, without a device. The editing gives each half its own tempo, swift in Poland and suspended in France. The sound is exact: the cassette of station noise is sound design made a clue. The costs: at times the filters and the soft light tip into prettiness; Volter’s Alexandre is thinly written and acted to a shade; and the clue-trail is staged with less tension than its length asks.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the street fighting in the Kraków square, police and demonstrators in the public history of 1990, and the puppet theatre in a French school. One law governs both: beneath events runs a correspondence that the people inside them only feel. Weronika crosses the riot to see her double, and the history passes her by; the puppet show is the same law staged, a made life dying and rising before a woman who has just survived a death she does not know. Ball, glass, string and gesture obey it, and the light is one light in two countries. The strain is in the clue-trail, which follows a thriller’s law of cause and pursuit rather than the film’s law of intuition, and in the touches of the old woman crossing outside a window, which are the director’s signature as much as the film’s. The range is moderate: two lives, two countries, art and death.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on what a film of about 98 minutes holds. Two consciousnesses, kept apart and joined; the family, in two fathers and an aunt; the body, in a weak heart, illness and sex; art in three forms, choral singing, marionette theatre and the writing of children’s books; the political order, in Poland in 1990 and a demonstration crossed in a square; Europe divided and joined, in two countries and a tour bus; the sacred, implied in the whole and never named. They are held through the double, and that is what holds the axis lowest: history is crossed, not entered; labour is a schoolroom and a choir; the state is a riot glimpsed; the sacred is a mood. The orders are present and joined through the double, but none is entered at length, and a low mark on a small form describes the form.

Score: 7.2 / 10