The Double Life Of Véronique

Of all Krzysztof Kieslowski’s films, La Double Vie de Véronique is almost certainly the most intriguing and enigmatic. 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, setting up an intriguing dual situation that allows many of his favourite themes to be explored.

That situation is the parallel presentation of two young women in different parts of the world whose lives are somehow connected. Weronika (Irène Jacob) is a young Polish girl from the country with an incredible singing talent, who travels to Krakow, where she is successful in an audition. One day in the main square of Krakow, she spies a young woman who is the double of herself, a French tourist taking photographs of a student demonstration that is taking place on the square. The young woman is called Véronique (also played by Irène Jacob), and although they never actually meet, both women seem to sense or share a supernatural sense of connection with each other. A significant event in the course of Weronika’s life leads Véronique to change the path of her own life and seek to find an answer to the strange yearning that has suddenly developed inside her. When a travelling puppeteer visits the school where she works as a teacher, something about the man and the marionette performance he puts on drives her to seek him out for an answer.

La Double Vie de Véronique presents a typically Kieslowskian situation of parallel lives, allowing the director, as he did in Blind Chance and Three Colours Red (which also starred Irène Jacob) to explore the elements of connection, chance and fate that direct our lives. Rather than taking the god-like directorial position that he seems to adopt interweaving these lives in Red however, the manipulations of fate in this film seem less forced, allowing connections and linking elements between them to be freely associated in the viewer’s mind with no predetermined outcome, conclusion or moral to be drawn from it. This is somewhat appropriate and pretty much a necessity, since it is subject of self-determination or freewill and how much control we have over our lives is the central theme of the film, so it would be unwise of the director to make any definitive judgements. The central metaphor for the degree of self-determination we exercise is of course contained within the little puppet show, where a puppetmaster directs the lives of his characters in a story where a beautiful dancer dies only to undergo metamorphosis and be reborn into a new state. This marionette play has an important affect on Véronique’s life, and she seeks out the puppeteer without really knowing why, but clearly she is hoping that he can perform a similar rebirth in her own life. Or put simply, she seeks the redeeming force of his love. But putting things simply is dangerous in this film, and you have to take into consideration that it is in fact the puppeteer who initially seeks out Véronique through a series of cryptic messages, Kieslowski showing that the lines that draw people together are both fortuitous and directed by our own choices.

There are however many other small events and mysteries in the parallel connections between Weronika and Véronique that show up in many little details and coincidences and many other ways to view the messages and mysteries the film presents. The puppet show which is central to the film could even be seen as a metaphor for the film itself, a staging point in the director’s career, where he would leave behind his work as a Polish filmmaker, undergoing a metamorphosis through this film, and emerging from his cocoon to be reborn into a new life where the particularly Polish context of the themes in his early films would be remade as universal for a wider international audience. Indeed, if you examine La Double Vie de Véronique closely – and the film presents so many puzzles and enigmas that it practically demands such attention and even repeated viewing – you can see almost the entirety of the subsequent The Three Colours Trilogy contained therein, in a raw, embryonic form. In its treatment of the deep isolation, physical pain and sense of loss brought on by bereavement and the striving to find a sense of self and belonging in love – not to mention the vital role music plays in the film - it most closely resembles Three Colours Blue, but various connections can also be made to the themes of communication, friendship, family bonds and the interconnectedness of lives explored from other angles and greater depth in Three Colours Red and Three Colours White (the otherwise baffling Jean-Pierre episode here seems an underdeveloped version of the Karol Karol character in White). The little bent-over old lady struggling with her shopping who appears in parts of Dekalog and throughout The Three Colours Trilogy can also be seen reappearing here in a similarly mysterious way.

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. You don’t need to see any of the multiple versions Kieslowski prepared in his editing of the film - it is possible as it is to pick up something different every time you watch the film (the debt owed to it by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amèlie struck me on this viewing), and as long as its mysteries continue to intrigue, it will continue to be touching and vital in every single viewing.

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DVD
The Double Life of Véronique is released on DVD in the UK by Artificial Eye, a port of MK2’s recently released French 2-disc set. The set is presented on two dual-layer discs in PAL format and is Region 2 encoded.

Video
Photographed quite distinctively by Slawomir Idziak, Kieslowski’s DoP on The Scar, A Short Film About Killing and Three Colours Blue (and subsequently on films as visually striking as Gattaca and 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. It looks absolutely stunning on this Artificial Eye presentation, the richness of the tones simply radiating off the screen. It doesn’t look quite as washed-out by the yellow tint that renders the film almost monochrome in my VHS copy of the film. This looks much more accurate and effective, with blacks particularly benefiting from the deeper tone. The image shows remarkable stability, clarity and detail, although with the amount of filters used and colour manipulation applied, the image can look a little soft in places, but this is entirely how it would be expected to appear. Only in freeze-frame do the inevitable dot-crawl compression artefacts that plague MK2 transfers become evident, taking the form of little shifting blurred blocks of discolouration in backgrounds. In normal playback on a regular sized screen this is virtually undetectable and has minimal impact on the sheer beauty of the transfer.

Audio
There is a choice of Dolby Digital 2.0 and Dolby Digital 5.0 mixes of the film, both billed as “Original”. The film credits themselves indicate Dolby Stereo, and this was the mix I went with, though a sampling of 5.0 mix didn’t show any obvious differences, the mix remaining well to the front. The quality of the audio mix is very good, showing its limitations only at the very highest registers of Irène Jacob’s overdubbed singing voice – and believe me, that is high. Elsewhere, the dialogue is strong and clear and Zbigniew Preisner’s quite astonishing score for the film is given appropriately powerful treatment.

Subtitles
English subtitles are provided in a clear, white font and are optional.

Extras
The Artificial Eye release comes with a full set of invaluable extra features, identical to the French MK2 release.

Conversation with Kieslowski (52:40)
Conducted during the making of La Double Vie de Véronique, this is simply superb, Kieslowski proving as always to be an excellent interviewee, providing deep, intelligent and thought-provoking responses to questions about his work and background as a filmmaker. The interview is intercut with many behind-the-scenes takes of the filming and editing of Véronique.

Interview with Irène Jacob (16:42)
In a recent interview, the actress recalls her screentest for the film, the preparation that went into the development of her characters, and the collaboration and intuition that played a large part of the filming. She confirms that Kieslowski had put together as many as 15 radically different versions of the film, with many scenes being left out of the final cut.

Kieslowski, Polish Filmmaker (30:35)
An informative documentary, this provides a good overview of the themes and the political backdrop of Kieslowski’s Polish film work, up to and including La Double Vie de Véronique.

Short Films
Rounding out a superb selection of quality features are a few examples of Kieslowski’s early documentary film work. Along with his other documentary films like From A Nightporter’s Point Of View and The Office, these films not only give an in-depth insight into the lives of people in Poland during the 1960s and 1970s, but, like the director’s other films, extend into a more universal examination of the lives and connections that exist between people.
The Musicians (1958) (10:07) is not by Kieslowski, but by Kazimierz Karabusz, a teacher at the Lodz Film School who was a great influence on Kieslowski. The film shows a group of tram workers who play in a brass band in their spare time.
Factory (1970) (17:30), fascinatingly cutting between a board room discussion and the work on the shop floor of a steel factory, captures the incompetence and bureaucracy of the workers' situation and the precarious position that the shortage of spare parts places everyone in.
Hospital (1978) (20:20) takes this even further, following 24 hours in the life of a group of doctors, showing their daily struggle to cope with similar deprivations and inadequate equipment.
Railway Station (1980) (12:42) covers another public institution where people of different statuses and circumstances interact. This time however there is the ominous presence of a surveillance camera watching everything that is going on.

Overall
A key film in the career of Krzysztof Kieslowski, La Double Vie de Véronique, perhaps because of its position as a linking film between his Polish and his French films, is one of the director’s most fascinating and intriguing films – certainly his most lyrical and enigmatic. It doesn’t perhaps have the intellectual rigour of his Polish films, or the same level of depth, coherence and complexity that spreading these themes across the breadth of the three films in The Three Colours Trilogy permitted, but perhaps because of the intuitive purity and mystery of La Double Vie de Véronique’s treatment, it tends to bring out a deeply personal and unique response from every viewer, and remains a beautiful and vital piece of filmmaking. Finally released on DVD, the film’s technical qualities are also more evident than ever, particularly in this striking 2-disc presentation from Artificial Eye.