The Double Life of Veronique

Let me begin with Krzysztof Kieslowski's own words:

I don't film metaphors…For me, a bottle of milk is simply a bottle of milk; when it spills, it means milk's been spilt. Nothing more. It doesn't mean that the world's fallen apart, or that the milk symbolizes a mother's milk, which her child couldn't drink because the mother died early, for example. A bottle of spilt milk is simply a bottle of spilt milk. And that's cinema. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean anything else…No, I don't film metaphors. People only read them as metaphors, which is very good. That's what I want. I always want to stir people to something. It doesn't matter whether I manage to pull people into the story or inspire them to analyze it. What is important is that I force them into something or move them in some way.

While Kieslowski may not be totally honest here about the role the filmmaker plays, he is nonetheless getting at an important point: Meaning is not inherent in the image itself, but is created in the process of decoding and contextualization of the image performed by the spectator (and, despite Kieslowski's disclaimer, with considerable guidance from the artist). It is certainly clear from the second part of the quotation that this filmmaker presses his audience to take a very active role in the viewing process. In order for this to happen, the film must both pull us in and inspire us to analyze—a simultaneous process of experiencing and observing.

Content and Process

The Double Life of Veronique is a film whose structure resists attempts at easy resolution of its many contradictions. Even more than in Kieslowski's trilogy, Trois Couleurs, a first viewing yields more confusion than clarification. But this is a situation every analyst is familiar with; it is the nature of our craft that we are required to tolerate ambiguity and anxiety, and to decide when it is appropriate to be active and when to sit back and wait. What I will do is describe some of my experiences with, and observations about, Veronique and offer an approach to the film that may provide a point of departure for further thought.

I have come to feel it is most fruitful for me to approach a film through the examination of the formal aspects of the filmcraft in an effort to understand what it communicates and how it is done. This means looking not only at the narrative but also at the particulars of the medium, the narrational strategies beyond the verbal text. By strategies, I mean, for example, the sequences of images, the sound track, the camera shots and techniques, lighting, mise en scene and editing. I have also found, as is often the case in clinical work, these extra-narrative phenomena are often most clearly visible on the film's margins. (The most meaningful exchange in a given psychoanalytic session may happen as the patient is walking out the door; in a film, a shot before the narrative begins might be extremely important).

In Double Life, I am struck immediately by the arresting quality of the film's earliest moments. Before the film credits, before the title, we see two little girls, one in Poland on Christmas Eve; the other, in early spring, in France, and we are told the year is 1968. Veronika (as we later learn she is called) lies on her back, looking up at the stars; Veronique is intently examining the underside of one of the early leaves of spring. The dead of winter, the return of life in spring. The macrocosm of the stars, the microcosm of a first leaf. Veronika is filmed at an angle such that she first appears upside down on the screen;

Veronique is right-side up. A tension is established between these polarities and the fact that these little girls are identical.

In each vignette, there is a speaker who is never identified, never seen and is never heard from again. Yet we know, with a certainty only partially informed by logic and intellect, in each case the speaker is the baby's mother. Later in the film, we learn each mother died young and left a baby daughter to the father's care. These gentle early scenes, into which we have been so tenderly drawn, abruptly end, and we are thrust back out of the film to the observing position as the credits roll; we are returned to reality and reminded it's only a movie.

What do we make of a film that employs the devices here displayed: two brief scenes appearing, somewhat uncharacteristically, before the opening credits and film title, with characters who then disappear from the text? Such techniques are not all that unusual in contemporary, non-genre films, especially European ones, but they still produce a very striking effect and compel the viewer's attention. For me as a spectator, such moments convey a message from the filmmaker: Figure out what this sequence means to you. Make sense of it for yourself, and allow the film to unfold for you against the backdrop of your own fantasy.

Here is my fantasy, “Mother was only with me briefly in the opening moments of my life. Just as I was beginning to know her, to be able to hold her image in my mind, her voice in my heart, the pictures stopped, the music silenced. Something ended forever, and when, after a time, my life came back to me, I was forever changed.” In this context, the double life is the story which begins with the line, “After my mother died, this was what happened to me.”

Doublings and Reversals

This was my fantasy, the scrim through which I experienced the film. What did happen to Veronique? Is she two people or two sides of one individual? (Or both?) The ambiguity is reinforced by the complexities of the film's structure. Although we are apparently moored to real space and time by the specific dates and locations provided, this is clearly not an example of a classic Hollywood narrative film. The uncanny experience of the coincidences of the two girls' lives moves the film (and the viewer) into a kind of parallel universe, where chronology gives way to a sense of timelessness and circularity. As spectators we become aware of a complex tangle of doublings and reversals. Veronica starts as a pianist but turns to voice when her hand is injured. She pursues a strenuous career despite signs of a heart problem and knowledge of a family history of sudden, early death. For the sake of her art, she rejects a man who seems to love her. Veronique, on the other hand, is a singer who, on intuition, quits her studies and becomes a music teacher, after which she learns of her heart problem. Her quest for fulfillment leads her to pursue love rather than career.

An interesting tension is created, and a very subtle one: The oppositions are not exact but approximate, while the supposed identities also demonstrate a twist that moves them beyond the simplistic and the obvious. And the iconography of the film consistently reiterates this tension. Each girl has a small rubber ball decorated with stars that she carries with her in her purse. We do not know where the ball comes from, but it seems the sort of item many people might have, not particularly personal. What is fascinating is the way the ball is used, as a lens. Veronika sees images upside down through hers as she looks out the train window on her way to Krakow. Fabbri (who is involved with Veronique) similarly uses Veronique's ball as a lens as he explores her through the contents of her purse.

Fabbri and the Polish Veronika are both shown as curiously exploring in a somewhat solipsistic way. Antek, after pursuing Veronika to Krakow, tells her he is staying in room 287 at the Holiday Inn; Veronique is given room 287 by a hotel clerk when she pursues Fabbri to Paris. Again, this doubling has a rather impersonal quality; lots of hotels have rooms 287. But it establishes a relation between Antek and Veronique; both realize they are pursuing someone who does not really want them. One might wonder whether the suggestion is being made that Antek and Veronique would be the ideal couple, stretching across the two stories. But Kieslowski resists such simplistic happy endings.

Each of the Veronicas has an idiosyncratic habit of rubbing her eyelid with a ring. Here is a more personal object image, but it is not explored by the filmmaker, again leaving room for the spectator's fantasy (Mine is that, in each case, it is the mother's ring, and rubbing it against the eyelid functions to soothe anxiety, related to past memories of being held and touched by mother).

The list of images and coincidences concerning them is seemingly endless but known only to the spectator, not the characters. In this sense, we see a foreshadowing of the near encounters and near misses of Red, one of the films of Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs trilogy. In Veronique, when the music director tells Veronika she has won the competition, albeit not unanimously, he embraces her.

Over his shoulder, she sees a woman glaring at her, presumably a judge or teacher whose protégé was not selected. Veronika is momentarily disconcerted by this hateful stare. The same woman briefly appears in the Gare St. Lazare as Veronique is on the verge of locating Fabbri, but she is never actually the object of Veronique's gaze.

Then there is the shoelace sent to Veronique by Fabbri, which is doubled by the string on Veronika's portfolio of music. Veronika, at her audition, winds the string tightly around her finger as she reaches for the top notes of the melody; when she suddenly releases it, it falls completely straight, a portent of her sudden cardiac arrest (a flatline cardiogram) when she arrives at a similar point in her solo at the concert. When Veronique retrieves the shoelace from the trash can and rinses it, she pulls it taut, and as she dries it with her hairdryer, the ends twist together, and she twirls it with her fingers over the rhythm strip of her electrocardiogram. Knowing of her arrhythmia, Veronique will not let the line go flat.

There is an analogy between the sheets of the musical score Veronika studies, which are knocked out of her arms by a man running through the square, and the sheet of paper that records Veronique's EKG rhythm strip. This image leads us, finally, to another element of the filmcraft, in which Kieslowski elaborates the mysterious connections between the two women—the film's musical score and the sound track. Kieslowski has commented on the importance of music in all of his films; in Double Life, the score works in complex ways. The music consists of fragments of Veronika's concert piece, and its appearance serves different functions at different times. The theme at the beginning of her fatal performance is later repeated in the music classroom as Veronique's cello students labor over their instruments. These are diegetic elements; that is, they are not background music for the film but function as elements in the story, such as the sound we hear of the orchestra playing or the students rehearsing. But at several moments in the film, it is unclear whether or not the characters can hear the music we hear, and at other times, it seems the characters hear it, but there is no source for the music at that point in the narrative (extra-diegetic elements).

We find moments when Veronique appears to hear Veronika singing. At such moments, their chronic but vague sense of connection to something larger than themselves gives place to an intense and uncanny awareness of each other. This uncanny effect is sustained and intensified by the misidentified photograph and Veronika's sudden cardiac death. Veronika dies in performance at the moment Veronique is having an orgasm. Veronique is seized with a feeling of profound grief she cannot understand. Earlier, on a trip to Eastern Europe, Veronique had taken Veronika's picture without noticing the uncanny resemblance; interestingly, Veronika had noticed, an intriguing asymmetry never explained by the narrative. At this moment, Veronika has embarked on the course that will eventually result in her death; we might wonder if the recognition of the double is what allows her to continue on this path, perhaps feeling a magical protection from the awareness of the other. When, later, Fabbri misidentifies the photograph, pronouncing it to be a beautiful image of Veronique, Veronique suddenly, intuitively, understands her earlier inexplicable experience of grief to be related to this strange yet familiar image she has recorded but not seen. It is as though, belatedly, too late, Veronique has put down the camera and returned Veronika's gaze.

As Veronika is being buried, Kieslowski employs the device of shooting the scene from within the grave, from the dead Veronika's point of view. There were two earlier point of view shots that were also arresting (pun intended), both related to Veronika's cardiac illness and death. The first occurs when she is gasping on a bench in the park and the man in the trench coat exposes himself to her. The camera seems to “keel over,” as though in a faint. The second is used as she is dying on the stage floor at the concert. At the moment of her death, there is a long high shot from the back of the concert hall which might be seen as the representation of an out of body experience, as some have described experiencing during cardiac arrest. In some sense, through these camera shots, we are asked to see her as living on; and indeed, in death she appears to inhabit the heart and mind of Veronique.

In this way the film takes us beyond the real, into a timeless space, a space suggestive of the eternal realm in which mother and child first experience the unfolding of their relationship. In some way, Veronika and Veronique have each become the image of the absent mother for the other. Is this enough to allow Veronika/Veronique to go on? In Kieslowski's words, “Veronique's constantly faced with the choice of whether or not to take the same road as the Polish Veronika; whether to give in to the artistic instinct and the tension intrinsic in art, or to give in to love and all that it involves.”

In the case of Veronika, the choice of art is accompanied by denial of certain realities that ultimately do her great harm. Her denial seems to be related to a sense she is not alone, that she is in some way magically protected, a kind of thinking we often see in childhood about the magical protection of mother love. Veronika moves through her world like a child, and the special “other” out there ultimately is unable to protect her from herself. Veronique, on the other hand, experiences a profound sense of loss and grief at the moment of Veronika's death, and thereafter makes a number of attempts to confront reality and to connect with the world.

Although she has no clear idea why she must stop singing, she is convinced it is right for her. She seems, more than Veronika, to take responsibility for her life. It is as though she were to narrate her part of the story with an introductory line, “After my mother died, I searched the world to find her. But all I could find was the image which she had held in her gaze, my own face.” Veronika denies the reality of her illness and pays with her life; the simplistic counterpoint would be that Veronique takes a different path and lives happily ever after. But Kieslowski is never simplistic, and Veronique avoids some pitfalls only to stumble into others. One of these is Fabbri, the puppeteer.

Stealing Stories

In her romantic pursuit of Fabbri, Veronique goes to visit her friend and fellow teacher Catherine to find out whether Catherine remembers the puppeteer's name. Catherine realizes the story that was dramatized is familiar to her, and suddenly remembers it is from a children's book she reads to her daughter. She says, “He must have stolen it,” goes to get the book, and returning to Veronique says, “He didn't steal it; he wrote it.” Here, is represented the most important issue in the film. Which is it? Does Fabbri steal his stories or does he create them? When Veronique watches the puppeteer at work in his performance, he is telling the story of her life, although she doesn't yet know it. The puppet dancer breaks her leg and is, after a period of suffering, transformed into a butterfly who can dance with her wings. But in her metamorphosis, we cannot tell whether we are seeing a chrysalis or a shroud, and we think immediately of Veronika. Are the wings those of a butterfly, or could they be those of an angel? The music, of course, is the music of Veronika's performance; the metamorphosis occurs at the same point in the musical score as Veronika's death. Whose life is this, anyway?

Following the trail of Fabbri's clues, Veronique abandons herself to the adventure and uncertainty of love, opening herself to another as Veronika was unable or unwilling to do with Antek. When she realizes Fabbri has been using her, Veronique is devastated. She is ultimately mollified when he sees what he has done and begs her forgiveness. In a sense, however, his contrition makes his behavior even more appalling to the spectator, for we realize Fabbri apparently had no idea his behavior amounted to an appropriation of someone else's life. When he finally understands, as Veronique does, about Veronika, he still cannot seem to help himself, and weaves the two women into a story he begins to experience as his own creation. His Veronika does not smash her hand in a car door, but burns it on a stove. His Veronique pulls away although she has no experience that there is something to fear, just as the film's Veronique pulls away from a vocal career before she learns of its potential danger to her health. So, does he steal it, or does he write it? Who and what is the artist?

There is a final irony, which causes the film to double back upon itself. Fabbri, the fabricateur, the maker of the magic, says to the horrified Veronique that he will call his play The Double Life of…and shows her the two identical puppets he has created, mirror images of each other. Like a Mobius strip, The Double Life is now both inside and outside the narrative. In a sense, Fabbri has also undergone a metamorphosis, and the figure who emerges from his chrysalis is Kieslowski. This is an important postmodern theme in contemporary cinema, which sets it apart from the classic Hollywood genre approach. The story of the film is also the story of the filmmaker who appropriates stories from the world and transforms them into his cinematic art. Is he a creator of new worlds or a stealer of souls? And, as participants in the cinematic process, are we not, also, accessories to the crime?

Here is another quotation from Kieslowski, speaking of his pleasure in watching the work of Bruce Schwartz, the puppeteer who animated the marionettes in the film (and in the process articulating the fascination of his own work), “He animated those dolls and immediately within the space of a second, a whole new world appeared. Unlike most puppeteers, who usually hide their hands in gloves, he does the opposite, he shows you his hands. And, after a second or two, you forget those hands exist, because the doll lives its own life”.

He shows you his hands, and you forget they are there. The two indispensable, interlocking parts of the artistic process: the spectator, experiencing and observing, inside and outside the film, and the artist as prestidigitator and puppeteer, alluring and luring, whose sleight of hand simultaneously delights and deceives.