Released in 1991, "The double life of Véronique" helped Irène Jacob to forge her career as she won the Cannes Festival Best Actress Award thanks to her double role as Weronika and Véronique. The strength of the film lies in this omnipresent connection between the two women that look alike, feel each other's emotions and yet they have never met. Krzysztof Kieślowski, that tragically passed away five years later, created this masterpiece that marked his career : a wise mix of poetry, whose plot oscillates between dream and reality. The silences, the palpable emotions, the almost-buried memories, the constant distress feed this synergy between the two women. The whole movie excels thanks to the puppets' play, a real metaphor of the connection between the women. The yellowish photography, sometimes flirting with a well-polished sepia, enhances the emotions and the actor's glances. "The double life of Véronique" is visually meticulous, sensitive and whose originality has lost none of its superbness since its released. Full review on our blog Los Indiscretos : https://losindiscretos.org

The idea that we all have a double is as old as the hills and as old as that metaphor. Buy one get one free. Irene Jacob is given plenty of footage to show what she is made of. Nudity is right there in the first five minutes. But apart from that and some fine camera work there isn't much to hang on to. Soft porn to lift the tired plot left me cold from the start. Others love this kind of movie. It has all sorts of mysteries and what's going on here moments that passed for movie making when this film was made. It seemed like new ground to some but it wasn't. Just the same old tricks in another box. One scene sums it up. One of the Veroniques tells her father she is in love, in her underwear! 'Anyone I know?' he asks. Most fathers would tell her to go and get dressed.

Two exact look-alikes, the Polish Weronika and the French Véronique, inhabit the world of Krzysztof Kieslowski's memorable The Double Life of Véronique. Both women are played by the same actress, the radiant Iréne Jacob, winner of the Best Actress award at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. Born on the same day, they have green eyes and dark hair, congenital heart problems, and are talented singers, one a music teacher, the other a choir soprano, though each has a somewhat different personality. By its very nature, the story defies rational explanation and Kieslowski does not offer any, but the premise suggests that the separate self is an illusion, a projection of mind rather than an inherent expression of ultimate reality.Shot in Krakow, Poland and Paris, France, the film is suffused with the stunning cinematography of Slawomir Idziak and a sublime score by Zbigniew Preisner beginning with the song she sung by Weronica at her debut concert in Krakow. Weronica's story fills the movie's first thirty minutes. Weronica's exuberance and childlike innocence are captured in the film's early moments when, after an outdoor choir performance, she remains standing wide-eyed in the pouring rain, looking up at the sky, as the others run for shelter.Strangely though, Weronica tells others about an odd feeling that she is not alone, a feeling that is reinforced when she catches a glimpse of her doppelganger, Véronique, in the center of a Krakow square photographing a political protest demonstration (though she does not pursue her or mention the incident to family or friends). Though Weronica's desire to be a pianist was thwarted in an accident, her beautiful singing voice enables her to win a competition to join a musical company. As the young singer begins to perform her first concert, however, her heart condition sadly prevents her from continuing and the film shifts the remainder of its attention to Véronique.As we first see Véronique, she is in the middle of making love but suddenly bursts into tears without explanation, the incident occurring at the same moment when Weronika suffers serious heart problems at her concert in Krakow. Véronique has given up a promising singing career because she intuitively knows that it is "wrong for her" and instead becomes a music teacher of young children. During this same period she also schedules a cardiogram as if she has had some kind of warning. The film is propelled by the emotions Véronique is experiencing: a strange feeling of being alone in a suddenly uncertain world and an unexplained sense of loss.The mystery deepens when she begins to receive enigmatic packages in the mail from Alexandre (Philippe Volter), a puppeteer whose exquisite marionette performance she has seen and whose gifts are tied to objects from his children's stories. Concluding from listening to a cassette tape that was recorded at the Saint Lazare train station, she meets Alexandre, but her expectations of love are thwarted by his mundane reasons for the subterfuge, although it serves to enhance her sense of closeness with Weronica.Though it is tempting to search for some sort of explanation, The Double Life of Veronique is better off not being analyzed but should be savored for its elusive and impenetrable poetry. If it has any point to make other than its captivating quality as a work of art, it may be that, in life, energy is wasted in trying to figure things out and that the only thing that makes sense is to submerge ourselves in its beauty and succumb to its mystery.

I hated this movie while watching it.After much debating with myself and a friend I have come to the conclusion that this movie is about death. While I still have no sympathy for anyone or anything in the movie, I think the movie is nevertheless a lot more coherent than I initially thought, and for this - and also for the excellent filmography - I am giving it an 8/10. (1)A friend of mine suggested this movie is about the various possibilities of existence which cannot be realized simultaneously in real life. I felt this wasn't right but I didn't have another interpretation to offer. But now I do. Let's see what Weronika and Veronique are all about:(a) SimilaritiesThey are both sickly creatures. They have a father, they don't have a mother. They are both engaged with music. They know and interact with a series of characters of no consequence (the aunt, the colleague from school, etc.) They both appear in a love relationship where their lovers are more involved than themselves. They both dismiss those lovers. They both have a plastic (?) ball and are fascinated by what the world looks like as reflected through it. They both watch an old woman through the window. They both seem to drift without touching the world around them. They both see their doppelgänger.(b) DifferencesWeronika lives in Poland. She is not independent (lives with her dad / aunt). She seems young and inexperienced. She moves to another city for the sake of her aunt. Feels that she is not alone in the world. She dies singing.Veronique lives in France. She is financially independent (she lives on her own, has her own job). She seems more mature, and already anchored in music (she has a music teacher, she teaches music). She quits her music lessons although her teacher thinks she has a great talent. She feels alone in the world. She falls in love (Weronika never seems in love; talking to her aunt, she seems excited to have slept with that guy but abandons him). She accepts the game played on her by the anonymous stalker. She becomes acquainted with her puppeteer. She sees her doppelgänger, in the end. She begins to see how he may be the one manipulating her. Veronique's story begins as Weronika dies. This chronological details is supported by the photo / negative from Poland, which is the moment when the stories of the two girls become anchored in reality and aligned in a particular chronological order.So far, what does this movie seem to be about? Let's say that Veronique's first apparition and inexplicable grief is a premonition of what might happen to her if she continues taking music lessons / trying to make a career in music. This premonition leads her to abandon her existential possibility of realizing her potential through music. Having abandoned this possibility (I don't feel like it should be called her 'ideal' - Veronique doesn't really seem to have a passion, a dream, an ideal!), she somehow loses her path. Is she the ballerina who breaks her leg and then turns into a butterfly, as the ballerina in the puppeteer's story? This seems rather to be Weronika's story. Veronique refuses to break her leg, so there's no question of her turning into a butterfly. Is, then, the movie about a character with a talent for music to whom her talent is fatal, and for whom abandoning the talent would lead to perdition all the same? If yes, then the movie does make sense, although I'm still not sure about the puppeteer. It's as if the puppeteer had somehow condemned both these girls to death, and loves them when they have accepted their sentence. (Antek too could be some kind of a puppeteer: he tells Weronika he loves her only after she had come to the city and was already pursuing her talent! Likewise, Alexandre too tells Veronique he loves her only after she had accepted to enter the game of the anonymous caller.)If this death sentence were the true meaning of the movie, then it also would be easier to understand why Veronique has two lovers (the first, unnamed one, and then, Alexandre), and Weronika only one: Veronique quits music and drives away her first lover, and this could be a rejection of dying for her talent. Her condemnation to death is, however, still there: having failed to kill her through music, the puppeteer steps in himself.The weird thing about this interpretation is that, although both girls do seem to have some relation to music, neither of them gives the impression that music is the biggest thing in their lives. Music is just something they happen to be good at, good enough to be remarked and regretted when they cannot / refuse to pursue it. For the rest, these girls look like lambs brought to the slaughterhouse. For example, when Weronika's aunt asks her how her audition had gone, Weronika answers something like (I don't remember the exact wording): it went TOO well. Apathetic...(2) My conclusion about the movieAfter lots of thinking, here's, then, my conclusion regarding what this movie is about: I think it is about condemnation to death, regardless of other life details. This idea seems supported by that episode where Veronique holds the shoestring across the graph paper in a straight line over her recent EKG graph. The straight line of an EKG = death.Everything else in the movie is ballast. The doppelgänger thing is rather a red herring: it muddles the waters without any pay-off, really.Now I understand why the music is throughout so sad / sinister. Also, why there is so much ballast, so many gestures of no consequence. So many attempts at a plot but with no actual realization. The characters are doomed, and that's all.