The Double Life of Véronique

Every decade, one director comes along who, although perhaps not the greatest filmmaker working at the time, nevertheless creates a run of films that define its aesthetic capacities and artistic fearlessness. Michael Powell dominated the '40s, Nicholas Ray the '50s. Godard changed the face of cinema in the '60s with his magnificent string of films that broke the medium apart, re-assembled it, then deconstructed it once more. (It is difficult to say who fit the bill for the '70s and '80s, the former because so many astonishing filmmakers came to prominence, the latter because so few did). Krzysztof Kieslowksi died in 1996, yet he more than any other director encapsulated the artistic triumphs of a decade that saw the resurgence, however brief and quickly commodified, of art in the cineplex. His Trois Coleurs trilogy comprised three individual masterpieces, and though his ten-part imagining of the Ten Commandments, The Decalogue, came out in native Poland in the '89, it did not reach other countries until the early '90s.

The Double Life of Véronique, his first true foray into the decade, is, in a single film, every bit the triumph of the multi-entry behemoths that surround it. In fact, judging by cinematographer Sławomir Idziak's gorgeous use of golden-green hues in his photography of Poland and France, Véronique might easily fit in as the "fourth" entry in the Three Colors trilogy: Yellow. Like the trilogy, it shows the manner in which all life is connected, albeit in even more abstract a fashion. Short Cuts and Magnolia this is not; for Kieslwoski, the ties that bind are intangible and universal, not interestingly coincidental.

From the opening shot, of a skyline inverted to show the evening sky at the bottom of the frame as if the sea overlooking the "horizon" of the Polish city as a mother instructs her child to look for a star. This image is recalled later when Weronika (Irène Jacob) bounces a transparent ball with little stars embedded in the polymer, which Kieslowski frames in a close-up to peer through its distorting plastic. Along with the numerous shots of objects in mirrors and glasses -- including one incredibly framed shot of a man drawing, his project blurred in front of him yet clear in microscopic form in one of the lenses of his glasses -- this imagery gives the film an air of oneiric ethereality.

Kieslowski spends the first 25 minutes or so in Poland following Weronika. A casually upbeat and personable woman, Weronika impresses us first with her beauty, but attention shifts almost immediately onto her jaw-dropping singing voice. It's a voice meant for the stage, yet it has an unorthodox quality even to those without knowledge in classical singing. A teacher recognizes her peculiar skill and arranges an audition with a venerable, old conductor, who gives her a solo in his upcoming performance.

Though ostensibly happy, Weronika occasionally feels a disconnect from the world; when a flasher exposes himself to her, Weronika barely processes the moment. At one point, she tells her father, "I have a strange feeling. I feel that I'm not alone," having previously looked at a photograph of herself with curiosity, as if looking at another person. Confessing this feeling, Weronika appears to look off into nothingness in that way that we all do when we imagine we're someone else in another place. Yet Weronika really does have a döppelganger, whom she spots boarding a tourist bus. This identical woman does not notice Weronika, but the Pole cannot focus on anything but this reflection, standing helplessly as the person she envisions in the back of her mind rides off to the next photo-worthy spot in Kraków. Shortly thereafter, Weronika, who'd previously expressed a mysterious pain in her chest, performs her solo at a concert but suffers a greater jolt of pain, collapses halfway through and dies. Like Antonia in The Tales of Hoffmann, Weronika pays the ultimate price for her talent.

At the moment mourners finish throwing dirt on her casket, Kieslowski cuts to France. Via a shot warped and distorted as if filmed through a crystal ball, the director introduces us to Véronique in the middle of sex with her boyfriend. Suddenly, Véronique massages her side as if hit by a minor pain, and she tells her lover that she inexplicably feels a pang of sadness and loss. With the split nature of the film clearly aiding Véronique -- she receives nearly thrice the screen-time as her foil -- Kieslowski tricks us into thinking that the Frenchwoman will discover the link between the two and then uncover some sort of explanation for the existence of two like women.

But that is not his way. Kieslowski does not fashion The Double Life of Véronique into a mystery, though a significant part of its pull is undeniably its mysterious element. Rather, he resets the film, re-establishing the first 25 minutes almost as a prequel, or at the very least a helpful mini-guide to the self-reflexive callbacks and reinterpretations of its initial images. Jacob, then known only for her first role, a minor part, in Au revoir les enfants, if at all, handles the change effortlessly. Véronique is, as its title would suggest, a film about its protagonist and the differences between her two lives.

Some of the difference between the two involve their diverging life paths. After feeling that tinge of sadness at Weronika's death, Véronique speaks to her music teacher the next day to announce that she can no longer seek lessons. The tutor reacts like a revolutionary denied a human right, railing that the waste of such talent should be considered a legitimate crime (it may well be in France). Véronique gives no concrete reason for quitting, and maybe she doesn't have one. Besides, if you based such a decision on a subconscious vision of your döppelganger dying for the singing talent they share, would you tell anyone?

More substantive, however, are the differences in the people themselves. Where Weronika appeared to be mostly happy save for some moments of disconnection, Véronique's mannerisms suggest the opposite. She teaches music to schoolchildren rather than pursue her dreams like Weronika -- a cheeky allusion to the old maxim, "Those who can't do, teach," perhaps? -- and moves through the world without calling attention to herself, despite her beauty. Happiness is as rare for her as the opposite is for Weronika, and her joy comes from insular activities like reading where Weronika's comes from reveling in the world around her.

As he was in The Decalogue and Blue, composer Zbigniew Preisner, under the guise of fictional 18th-century composer Van den Budenmayer, plays a pivotal role in La double vie de Véronique. The aria that "kills" Weronika, in the unfinished concerto that would later be played in its entirety in Blue, is the same Van den Budenmayer piece that Véronique teaches to her class. Preisner's music even serves as the mechanism that sparks the second major turn in Véronique's life. As she sits among her schoolchildren watching a marionette show -- itself scored by a gorgeously lyrical piano composition -- Véronique hears snatches of the concerto in her head when she gazes upon the puppeteer, Alexandre (Philippe Volter). Later, he calls her anonymously, and she hears the music in the background (or the background of her head) once more. The music exerts a pull on the woman, leading her to tell her father that she's in love without meeting the man.

Alexandre comes to represent the manipulative qualities of all the men in Weronika and Véronique's lives, tricking Véronique into meeting him out of attraction as well as his growing obsession with her double nature. He even fashions marionettes after the two (the film's most blatantly obvious metaphor) and drafts a story after Véronique's feelings of double lives. As he spitballs ideas such as the notion that one woman burned her hand as a toddler, while the other nearly touched the stove in her own home a few days later, only to pull away as if she'd already learned her lesson, Véronique looks at him with faint recognition, as if something similar occurred in her own life. Or someone else's.

By this point the search for an definite interpretation, whatever that may entail, might normally drive a more serious filmgoer insane. What is the meaning of the inverted skyline and the toy ball that recalls it, or the flasher, or even of the color tinting (which Kieslowski and Idziak supposedly used to offset the natural gray of the dull Polish buildings and the look stuck)? Surely there's a point to all this? A popular reading suggests that Véronique serves as a political allegory, with the two döppelgangers each representing their respective country: Weronika, the Pole, spots her French double, who is too busy taking empty photographs of all the sights without truly paying attention to what she's capturing -- only at the end does she notice a frame containing a her that isn't her. Véronique doesn't realize that her spitting image is right in front of her, but Weronika can think of nothing but this liberated version of herself. For, if Weronika truly does represent Poland, then her death signifies the sacrifice of Poland to the Soviet Union to ensure Allied victory in World War II. Her death "warns" Véronique into quitting her musical aspirations, just as Poland's sacrifice helped to ensure the salvation of France, which only noted that something felt missing once the Iron Curtain fell over Eastern Europe and divided the continent. Such a reading is valid, certainly, but Kieslowski had expended his political fire by 1991, having long before purged himself with his early, politically motivated documentaries. Whatever allegorical content exists in the film, even if intended, likely is not the main thrust of the picture.

Perhaps, then, it simply points out the unnoticed threads that connect the world; both characters fiddle with threads, even, twirling them around their fingers, and Véronique even lays a string over her EKG readout, pulling it taut at one moment as if placing Weronika's flat-line over her vitals readouts. Or maybe it's all an ode to Irène Jacob, or at least intended to be a start vehicle for whomever won the part. Though the film marked the first collaboration between director and actress, the nature of the role and the loving way Kieslowski captures her perfect face in pure shots like that of Weronika singing in the rain all seem tailor-made to turn her into a star.

That's what's so strange and wonderful about Kieslowski's cinema. In the '90s, the Polish director's corpus likely struck many as the textbook definition of arthouse fare, yet it's not right to call him pretentious. For one thing, he conveys a genuine intelligence that is never outpaced by his abstraction. Second, he's not so interested in meaning for all of his shots so much as the emotions they inhabit and the ones they might create in the audience. He fills The Double Life of Véronique with so many small, beautiful details, from Weronika bouncing her ball into a ceiling to make dust fall around her like rain to the final shot of Véronique caressing a tree, that what might seem an obtuse layering of symbols instead becomes a heartfelt mapping of images that capture the ephemeral nature of life, paradoxically chosen with utmost care. As music plays such a large role in the film, it's no surprise that that Kieslowski manifests this dichotomy through sounds as well, though not Preisner's score. In one scene, Véronique carries a set of chimes around the music building, their clanging soft and gentle even as they slam about in discordant cacophony. As usual, Kieslowski leaves elements that might explain what's going on out of the picture: he cares not for the hows, nor even really the whys. His is cinema of the moment, metaphysical in its transcendence of corporeality. He aims for the heart, not the mind. Besides, who could see the two shots that most convey the women's happiness, of a glorious close-up of Weronika singing with unbridled ecstasy in the rain as everyone else scatters for cover and a sudden, thrilling crane shot of Véronique rising out of bed after putting down a book, and call Kieslowski pretentious?

After all these words, what's fundamental about The Double Life of Véronique is that it's beautiful to look at, a normally casual dismissal intended to be the sole attribute of an otherwise forgettable film. But Kieslowski captures the joy of beauty in ways that so few filmmakers can even approach. It is by no means futile to search for meaning in his work, but their basic pleasures play to the senses. Kieslowski walks the line between simplicity and complexity through his abstraction: do we search for the meaning of each image, or can we bring ourselves to stop wracking our brains and accept their overwhelming beauty and the strangely captivating and engaging quality they have?

There is no magic in The Double Life of Véronique, or not of the visible variety, anyway. It contains images that we know to be real despite the artificiality of the color tinting and self-reflexive use of filters, yet those touches, coupled with the elliptical nature of the director's storytelling, suggest a universality that humans cannot yet see, as if the fate that determines the heroines' paths allow us to see its process. He allows us to see the world that, like Véronique, we're too caught up inside to properly pay attention to. Maybe it all adds up to zero; Kieslowski's films exist in a world where poetry is allowed to exist for its own sake. Actually, they drift closer to mainstream entertainment than anyone would care to admit, in that they ultimately serve as distractions. Where Kieslowski differs from those who choke theaters with blockbusters, however, is that he does not distract us from life; he distracts us with it.

1989 Rewind: The Decalogue

"God is very simple, if you have faith," says the aunt of a young agnostic in the first installment of Krzysztof Kieślowski's ten-part series The Decalogue. But that's the thing, isn't it? Faith is always easy for those who have it, those who have never paused to reflect upon it. The people who need it most, however, will only ever see madness and illogic of it. You likely wouldn't expect Kiéslowski, himself an agnostic if not an outright atheist, to write and direct a series on the Ten Commandments, but then how many of the atheist Bergman's films are the greatest movies on faith ever made?

Besides, The Decalogue reflects Kiéslowski and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz's manner of handling themes metaphysically and intimately. These 10 films neither praise faith nor condemn it, nor do they deal exclusively with one commandment at a time. For example, Part III, concerning the commandment "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy," barely ties into that commandment and instead focuses on a lie. Many of the short films deals with more than one commandment at a time, with characters from other parts slipping in and out of the camera's peripheral vision as they move throughout the apartment complex the characters all share.

Each part was written by Piesiewicz and Kiéslowski and directed by Kiéslowski, but they used a different cinematographer each time to reflect the shifting tone of each chapter. Part III and its Yuletide setting are festive, while Part V, "Thou shalt not kill," is appropriately unsettling. Each of the films uses the sort of soft, cheap stock made for TV at the time, butKiéslowski makes them no less mesmerizing than his glorious Three Colors trilogy. He knows just how to light his characters, the angle and color, to emphasize his themes and their thoughts without being too obvious about it.

Each of the short films works because the director uses the Commandments as a loose guideline for an idea, not as the rigid backbone of the episode. Part VII, "Thou shalt not steal" revolves around a kidnapping, but it is the mother who takes her own child, away from the child's grandmother, who poses as her mom. A Jewish student reveals to a professor that she is the girl the woman denied shelter to when she was hiding from the Nazis in Part VIII. The lie of the professor's life sparks a conversation between the two that brings the truth to light, but not in a way you might expect.

You see, these are real people, not artistic abstractions. Kiéslowski has the ability to take Bergman's philosophies and torments and let them flow naturally through conversations, not the despaired outcries of creations every bit as manufactured and meticulously placed as the rest of themise-en-scène (not a criticism, mind you). The intelligent scientist and his genius son program a computer to tell them when the local lake has iced over enough to be safely skated. The two place their faith in the machine, to tragic results. When the father turns to God in the end, this is not the moral of the story but rather the outgrowth of a man who's previous faith was shattered. The entire point of Decalogue I is not to mock science but blind faith in any philosophy.

The actors are uniformly superb, precisely because none calls attention to himself. In Part VI, the best of the 10 films, a young postal clerk falls in love with a woman and begins to spy on her. When he finally professes his love, she humiliates him sexually to prove that there is no such thing as love, only sex. The lad, played by OlafLubaszenko, is believably timid and ultimately sweet-natured, while the woman (Grazyna Szapolowska ) is hardened and jaded without coming off as artificial or overly bitchy. The story takes a number of turns as the boy attempts suicide, only for the woman to fall for him after all. It becomes a sort of battle of wits between the two, one that moves far outside the framework of "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and becomes something far more resonant for it.

The plotting of this world is sublime. In the professor's lecture in Part VIII, a student brings up the philosophical debate of Part II, wherein a woman decided to abort her lover's child based on her near-death husband's outcome and placed much of the responsibility for choosing on the doctor. In eight of the episodes, a strange man sits outside the apartment complex, silently watching events unfold. The director admitted he had no idea what the man stood for, but the obvious and popular response is that he is either Jesus or an angel, watching with displeasure as these characters commit their sins though never intervening.

The Decalogue is by turns bleak and hopeful: Part VII shows our young mother stripped once more of her child, while the ethical discussion of Part VIII renews the student's faith in humanity. Part X is the closest the director ever came to outright farce. These stories always seem to hit just the right notes and effortlessly display the myriad of emotions of the human condition because everything is so natural and underplayed. What we have here is one of the greatest achievements by any artist of the 20th century. Though planned as a TV miniseries and shot with TV stock for little cash, it is one of the towering works of cinema. I sit here now holding my rental copies and resigning myself to returning them, forcing myself not to break out the debit card and order a copy of my own (I need a job). If you're interested in foreign cinema or film in general, you simply must view this extraordinary, moving, dense yet completely engaging work.

Three Colors Trilogy

Krzysztof Kieslowksi's Three Colors trilogy is one of the deepest, most rewarding film series I've ever seen. Very loosely related, they nevertheless form one giant film on the basis of their themes. Kieslowski's The Decalogue was based on each of the Ten Commandments, and this trilogy picks, of all things, the French flag as its nucleus, with each film titled after one of its three colors.

Blue starts things off magnificently with a hauntingly metaphysical dissection of grief. Juliette Binoche plays Julie, the wife of a famous composer, who must cope with the sudden deaths of her husband and their daughter in a car accident at the film's start. Her grief is overwhelming yet contained; she does not spend the first half of the film (or even a scene) in hysterics. Instead, she retreats into agony.

Julie does everything she can to rid herself of the pain. She burns her husband's unfinished symphony (a piece celebrating the unity of Europe), sells the house and moves to Paris, hoping the bustle of the city will envelop her. She takes nothing with her save an object of her daughter's made of blue beads, and distances herself completely from her past life. Yet soon she realizes that a rejection of the physical cannot dull her psychological trauma and, despite her attempts to cut herself off from the old Julie, Paris throws several items from her past back into her life.

On the one hand, she reunites with Olivier, her husband Patrice's best friend and a fellow composer. Julie knows Olivier loves her and rejects him at first, then turns to him to feel something. The other major character Julie must contend with is her husband's mistress, who is pregnant with his child. The scenes between the two do not play out as they likely would have in an American film; there are no screams nor catfights, only two women so broken that they recognize each other as kindred spirits in grief.

The tone of the film is certainly blue; these characters struggle through indescribable sorrow. Yet that is not what the title really means. On the French flag, blue stands for liberty, and ultimately Julie's tragedy becomes a means to start anew, free of the baggage of a husband whom she loved but nevertheless had to support. As she becomes more involved with Olivier we learn who really wrote Patrice's music, and the answer might not be who you think. The film ends with a completed version of his planned symphony, booming a message of hope into the story and signifying a new chapter in Julie's life, one in which she can move forward without forcing herself to forget the past.

White, a comparatively straightforward black comedy, seems about as distant in tone as you could get to the ponderous Blue. Karol, a Polish immigrant who speaks halting French, stands in a courtroom for divorce hearings, where (in a painful and painfully funny moment) his wife tells the poor sod she doesn't love him, and he must have it translated for him by a third party.

The divorce leaves Karol penniless and unable to return home to Poland, and eventually he plays songs in the metro station for change. Finally he meets Mikołaj, a fellow Pole who offers Karol a job: a man wants to die but cannot bring himself to commit suicide, so he'll pay Karol to do the deed.

From there the plot balloons; Mikołaj smuggles Karol back to Poland in a suitcase, where he attends to his task, with a number of twists. Eventually he regains his wealth by buying up valuable land on loans and selling them to companies for massive profits. This wealth allows him to pursue the theme of the film (and, of course, the meaning of this section of the flag): equality.

But just as liberty for Julie was not political, equality for Karol is not social. He means to "get even" with his wife Dominique, and plans to use his money to fake his death and implicate her. In these passages Kieslowski uses Karol for a metaphor for his native Poland. Poland has long been at the mercy of various European invaders, but with the fall of the Iron Curtain it at last regained its independence. Yet it was unceremoniously dumped back into the real world with nothing, and it quickly hosted the same sort of ruthless capitalism that hit postwar Japan. Karol personifies this journey: he's cast into the streets after a separation, then accumulates wealth to get his revenge.

The ending is hopeful, though perhaps not entirely earned, and that, combined with its more plot-driven narrative, makes it inferior to its predecessor, and the final chapter. Red, the best of the three (though distinguishing between them is a bit silly), takes the pathos of White's black comedy and meshes it with the spiritual musings of Blue, then adds in character insight that is wholly its own. The theme this time is fraternity, and Kieslowski crafts a film that shows the intertwining nature of man in a way that would make Robert Altman proud.

Red centers on Valentine (Iréne Jacob), a model who states in the beginning that she feels lonely. She has a brother, but he's distant yet possessive of his sister and Valentine finds no comfort in him. Every day she walks past Auguste, a law student studying to become a judge, who lives in her apartment building with his girlfriend Karin, the unofficial weatherperson of the neighborhood.

One night she accidentally runs over a dog and takes it to the address on her collar. She enters the house to find Kern, a retired judge who sits hunched over in his living room, isolated from the world. He says he doesn't care about the dog, so Valentine takes the poor thing to the vet herself. Eventually she and Kern strike up a friendship and, after a fashion, Valentine learns that his hobby is eavesdropping on people.

Kieslowski ever, ever so slowly connects the various threads of the story; establishing relationships between some characters and breaking apart others. It lacks the improvised feel of one of Altman's or Renoir's pieces, but it nevertheless seems to paint a portrait of life. Red bookends the trilogy with another tragedy, though this one offers more immediate hope. In the ending scenes, we see the major pairings of each film standing together, total strangers linked in ways beyond their knowing.

Apart from tackling the themes of the French flag, Kieslowski constantly employs each of the three colors in his shots. In Red, Valentine prepares for her shower by opening her blue blouse to reveal a white bra as she stands by a red shower curtain. In Blue, children in white bathing suits don red floaters and jump into a blue swimming pool. The director also links the films in minor ways: apart from the final moments of Red, Julie's story crosses into Karol and Dominique's when she stumbles into their divorce hearing looking for her husband's mistress. His camera movements, particularly in Red rarely call attention to themselves, and only do so when they're so incredible that I can't stop wondering how he did he could move the camera so fast without losing focus.

All in all, Kieslowski offers up one of the great trilogies in film, one linked not by narrative or franchised characters but by ideas. To steal from Ebert, these films are "metaphysical through example, not theory." Where a Hollywood version of this would have introduced a smarmy friend who'd make wisecracks until the last ten minutes before saying "Julie, life ain't about yo' past, it's about you," at which point I'd punch my own TV screen, Kieslowski lets the characters figure it out for themselves. It never spoon-feeds us the answers and for that we should be exceedingly grateful, although the fact that treating an audience like an adult is seemingly so rare it deserves gratitude is a bit of a sad realization. I have not seen anything else of Kieslowski's work, and I don't like to make bold platitudes, but the strength of these films alone ensure I will seek out his entire filmography, because I've never seen a director like him.