Krzysztof Kielslowski: The Double Life of Veronique

"If I have a goal, then it is to escape from this literalism. I'll never achieve it; in the same way that I'll never manage to describe what really dwells within my character, although I keep on trying."

Director - Krzysztof Kielslowski
Writer - Krzysztof Kielslowski & Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Cast Character

Irene Jacob ... Weronika/Veronique
Halina Gryglaszewska ... La Tante
Kalina Jedrusik ... La femme Barjolee
Aleksander Bardini ... Le ched d'orchestre
Wladyslae Kowalski ... Le pere de Weronika
Jerzy Gudejko ... Antek

"That's the star we're waiting for to start Christmas Eve. You see it?"

A little girl hangs upside down from her mother looking at the Polish sky and city upside down showing a duality in the world - a connection to something or someone else in the horizon that must be fulfilled. The next scene has a little girl playing with a leaf that her mother explains to her. She talks about the veins of the leaf hinting at t connection like veins between organs and of these two individuals from different places of the world. These two individuals are Weronika and Veronique.

The beginning of the film we see Veronique singing with rain coming down on her face. Inside he tunnel she kisses her boyfriend like that of sexual penetration. The colors are earthy and natural with a green hue on their bodies. Weronika awakens to see her father doing a house painting. She tells her father she feels she is not alone. Green colors flash on her face as if the cosmos tell her something is out there.

She visits her aunt, a tarot card reader, and tells her she knows she made love to a man in the passageway. She watches a choir sing and join in. As she walks past the crowd she notices a red bus and a woman who looks just like her. She wears the same color as Weronika. After she has her audition she walks home and almost collapses. The colors around her are brown and dead. The table inside the auditorium is red like the color she constantly wears. The judges tell her she has won the competition. In her apartment it is completely red as well like the colors of Cries and Whispers.

Her boyfriend follows her bus to give her a present. He tells her he loves and his room number at a hotel. She chases after him and catches a ride to her apartment. She looks out the window to see on old woman passing by. She offers help to which the woman ignores.

Next she is singing in a choir with the symphony conductor who trained her. She dazes in and out of consciousness to fall and die on stage. Her soul floats above the crowd and sees herself being buried. The camera moves to a new couple with Veronique - her double. The camera is in obscura as we are transferred into her complementary double. She is sad telling her lover she is somehow grieving for someone.

She sees her music coach and tells him she is quitting. He is angry saying she is wasting her talent. She goes to a school to teach a class and is told the room is taken. The children watch a puppeteer performance. The natural green light of the audience shows a naturalness to the talents the inhabited puppet has. A girl in the audience is scared and the realization is frightening as like the magician in Fanny and Alexander. She sees the puppeteer and feels a love she cannot explain.

She gets a phone call with the symphony before Weronika dies. She doesn't understand what she is hearing. Later it is revealed she has been put in a hypnosis of sorts to come to a place where the sounds of the tape take place.

Her friend asks if she can go to court and lie for her saying she slept with a man 13 times. She wakes up to a kid reflecting a light from a mirror in her window. The kid is gone but the light goes on a mysterious book. She asks her friend the name of the puppeteer. He is Aleksandre Fabbri. She reads the books he has written becoming fascinated by him.

As the postman comes in she guesses she will get an empty box of Virginia Cigars and is correct. Kielslowski is obsessed with chance encounters and atmosphere. Colors accentuate the mood and the direction of the film and are a character in itself. Veronique receives a tape in the mail. She looks out the window again and sees the same old woman from before. She listens to the mysterious tape she gets and it is of the opera of Weronika. Veronique seems to enjoy the effort made into the tape. She is not scared.

She looks at the envelope and sees it came from Paris. She goes to a restaurant and sees tapes and a recorder on a table. She infers this from the station said on the recording. The man emerges. He tells her he would have waited two more days for her. This startling hypnotic effect on her he has shows one of the film's central themes - that of lack of free will. Something outside oneself in control. She runs from him scared out of her mind. She takes the first cab she can to get out of there.

The puppeteer apologizes and sleeps on her bed. He says he loves her and she says the same back. She sees the photo of Weronika and cries knowing she is dead. She tells him she now knows why he did everything. It is his way of saying to surrender to him. To not be afraid anymore. She goes to his room and sees him making puppets. She understands now his revelation to her. She is not scared, she is joyful.

He reads her something he wrote. "November 23, 1966, was the most important day of their lives. That day, at 3:00 in the morning, they were both born, each in a different city on a different continent. They both had dark hair and brownish-green eyes. At two years old, when both knew how to walk, one of them burned her hand on a stove. A few days later, the other reached out to touch a stove but pulled back just in time. Yet she couldn't have known she was about to burn herself."

She now realizes sadly how utterly powerless she is to the puppeteer. She touches a tree softly and her father feels it. Part of that power is now hers.

The film's main them is the lack of free will concerned with the puppeteer. When he first does his performance at a school a little girl is terrified understanding his power. He uses it to bring Veronique in and show her who he is and what he is capable of which terrifies her as well. As she surrenders she gives up hope only to console her father stroking the tree to keep him in a cloud of security.

A similar situation is seen in Fanny and Alexander when the magician shows Alexander controlling a real human corpse giving him life. Alexander is terrified but grows accustomed to the power around him.