255 - The Double Life of Veronique, 1991, Poland. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

255 - The Double Life of Veronique, 1991, Poland.  Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

I have a strange feeling.  Like I'm not alone.  Like I'm not alone in the world.

So says Weronika.

She is right.

She is not alone in the world.

She has a doppelganger.  A double.

Weronika lives in Poland.  She is a soprano.  She has a heart condition.

Veronique lives in France.  She is a music teacher.

The one girl, as a little girl, looks through a glass globe at Christmastime.

The other girl, as a little girl, looks through a magnifying glass at Christmastime.

She and she and we will look through many glass globes, prisms, windows, magnifying glasses, eyeglasses, camera lenses, and filters throughout the film.

Reflections create doubles.

Weronika sings in the rain.  The other members of the choir run from the rain.  Weronika stands her ground.  She finishes the final note.  The rain cascades down her cheeks like tears.

After the concert she joins the other girls as they run through the rain, looking for cover.

She makes love with her boyfriend.  Her fingers run through the fringes of the cover.  We will see fingers and fringes, and specifically a shoelace, throughout the film.

Weronika travels to Krakow.  On the train.  The glass pane on the train refracts light, compresses and expands images of the countryside.  Weronika watches through a glass globe, like the one she held as a child at Christmastime, and the buildings of the landscape pass her eye upside down.

The choirmaster rehearses the choir.  See how she trains them.  Weronika watches.  Weronika joins in.  The choirmaster hears it.  She likes it.  She offers her to audition.

Weronika leaves happily.  She bounces her ball.  It hits the ceiling.  A gold dust drops like flakes on her face, as the rain formed tears as she was singing before.

She walks outside.  Past a political protest.  We are in Poland near the fall of Communism.

A woman boards a bus.  A Frenchwoman.  A French tourist.  Taking pictures.  She too wears a red sweater and a black coat and red gloves.  Weronika watches her.

At this moment Weronika is watching Veronique.  She holds her gaze.

Veronique takes pictures.  We will see the proof sheet later in the film, and we will see that Veronique captured Weronika, and that she too was watching.  Taking note.  Observing her own double.

Weronika attends the audition.  She sings.  She twists a string through her fingers as she sings.

She walks through the leaves.  She falls in the leaves.  Her heart is struggling.  She is ill.

She sits on a park bench.  She grips her heart.  She feels pain.  The camera tilts at a forty-five degree angle.  The Polish cinematographer makes a Dutch angle.  A man walks by.  He opens and closes his coat.  She smiles.  Life can be absurd.

Weronika stands on stage.  She learns she has won the role.  The soloist.  She will sing solo in the concert.  A woman sits in the seats in a black hat.  She is not happy.

Weronika rides on the trolley tram.  She looks through the glass out the back window.  Her image refracts.  Her boyfriend follows on his motorbike.  She gets off.  They talk.  She apologizes for not calling.  She is young and free and pursuing a career.  They depart.  She turns and chases him.  Give me a ride home.  He takes her home.  I'll call.

Weronika sings the solo.  Another woman joins her.  The duet.  The double.

She grips her heart.  She sings.  The world grows wobbly before her.  She sings.  She works through the pain.  She hits the high note. She falls.  She dies.

Kieslowski suggested this character earlier in Dekalog: Nine, when the surgeon Roman had a patient named Ola, who was going to have surgery on her heart so that she could sing.

The choir is singing and the orchestra is playing the music of the great 18th-century Dutch composer Van den Budenmeyer.  The same composer whose work Ola sang in Dekalog: Nine.  Van den Budenmeyer's work was also used for the musical score of Three Colors: Blue, where Juliette Binoche is a composer who helps finish her deceased husband's final composition.

Kieslowski used the musical compositions of Van den Budenmeyer without obtaining the rights and paying royalties.  Therefore, he received a letter demanding payment, or else a lawsuit was to follow.

The only catch was that Van den Budenmeyer never existed.

The score of this film was composed by Kieslowski's colleague Zbigniew Preisner.

Preisner composed the music for Dekalog, Three Colors: Blue (Song for the Unification of Europe, 1 Corinthians 13), Three Colors: Red, and The Double Life of Veronique.  In all the films, the music is attributed to the fictional character Van den Budenmeyer.

Kieslowski and Preisner share a good sense of humor.

After Weronika dies, we take up with the life of Veronique, and we follow her journey and her experiences.

Veronique makes love with her boyfriend.  Through a shimmering and refracting glass.  She turns on a lamp with a green globe.  Golden light falls upon them.  She feels sad.  She feels as if someone has just died.  As if she has just lost someone.  Her boyfriend offers to stay but she says no.  He leaves. She cries.

Veronique is an elementary school music teacher.  She too has a heart condition.  She meets a man at a school assembly, a puppeteer performing a puppet show.  Afterwards she watches out the window as he packs his van and leaves.  He looks up at her.

At a traffic light she tries to light a cigarette.  She inserts it in her mouth backwards.  He sits in his van next to her.  He gets her attention.  She looks up.  He points to the cigarette.  It is in backwards. She reverses it.  She laughs.  The light turns green and they go their separate ways, each taking a different fork.

Veronique answers the phone.  No one speaks.  She speaks to the silence.

In a red glass the image of the Polish Weronika sings her solo just before collapsing.  Does Veronique see it?  Does she hear it?

She goes to her father's house.

The puppeteer is Alexandre Fabbri.  He makes puppets in doubles.  Because he is hard on them and needs a back-up in case one breaks during a show.

He also writes children's books.  He wants to write an adult book.  About a woman who has a double. But they never know each other.

Alexandre and Veronique will discover this mystery together.

She will show him the pictures she took when visiting Poland.  The picture with Weronika in it, standing, wearing similar clothing, looking the same.  Alexandre thinks it is a picture of Veronique but she explains to him that she is the one who took the picture.  The picture is of a stranger.  And yet not.

It is her double.

She cries.

"All my life I've felt like I was here and somewhere else at the same time."