The Double Life of Veronique *****

This movie is an Accidental Critic classic that has haunted us for years. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth seeing even just to experience the music which is as beautiful and haunting as anything we’ve ever heard. Music plays a fascinating role in the film and the background on that is almost as intriguing as the film itself. The director, Krzysztof Kieslowski (considered by many as the greatest director of this period (80’s-90’s)), formed a lifelong friendship and partnership with Zbigniew Preisner a Philosophy graduate student who abandoned Philosophical study and became a self-taught composer. Unlike many film/music collaborations where the music comes after the film and only serves to accentuate it, the work of Kieslowski and Preisner was a much deeper collaboration where the music informs and inspires the story as much as the story brings the music to life.

The story revolves around two women, Polish singer Weronika and French music teacher Veronique, who are as alike as identical twins. They each have an innate sense of the other’s existence, though they have never met. It is an emotional bond that leaves each with the feeling of “not being alone in the world”. That is until Weronika dies of a heart attack during a concert while singing a passage from Dante's Paradiso (Canto 2: 1-9).

This is a wonderfully enigmatic film that resists too much deconstruction, but we have recently become intrigued by the interpretations of one scholar, Sylvia McCosker, who sees in the film the deeply Christian theme of “coinherence” or souls that exist in essential relationship with one another. The theory of coinherence is the divine solidarity of humankind which (according to Charles Williams) was first a created reality that we enjoyed before “the fall” and was restored by the redemption we receive through Christ. By creation as well as by redemption none of us is alone. This may seem like a stretch interpretation of the film, but McCosker sees some good stuff. She writes…

The gospel story is alluded to at the beginning. First the child Weronika hears her mother telling her to look for the Christmas star; then the child Veronique hears her mother telling her to look at the new green leaves (which in a European context tells us it is spring, therefore Easter time). The heroine's name recalls one of the traditional Stations of the Cross. Reared in Catholic Poland, Kieslowski must have known the legend of Veronica - patron saint of photographers. St Veronica leaned from the roadside and with her veil wiped the blood and sweat from the face of Christ as he made his way toward Calvary. Afterward when she looked at her veil she saw stamped upon it the image of His face - hence her name, which means "true image".

You can read McCosker’s complete work on the film here.

The final scene is perhaps the most haunting. We see Veronique driving to her Father’s home and she stops to reach out and touch a tree, meanwhile the Father who is a furniture maker is cutting wood and suddenly stops. This has been a scene that we’ve been trying to interpret for years and we are still not satisfied, but Dr. Dan does have a theory which was helped by McCosker and speaks to the film’s treatment of art and the artist as someone who attempts to represent the divine but ends up exploiting it in the very act of praise. We would love to hear other theories on this scene if you got them.

But while all this is very interesting, the truth is that this is a film that should be experienced and “felt” like the way you have that inexplicable good feeling watching the sun rise or like the way a memory comes to you through a scent or like the way sometimes, you just deeply know…you are not alone.