The Double Life of Veronique [VHS]
by Krzysztof Kieslowski
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Product details
Actor: Aleksander Bardini, Halina Gryglaszewska, Ir?ne Jacob, Kalina Jedrusik, Wladyslaw KowalskiDirector: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Cinematographer: Slawomir Idziak
Writer: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Editor: Jacques Witta
Producer: Bernard-P. Guiremand
Producer: Leonardo De La Fuente
Producer: Ryszard Chutkowski
Writer: Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: French (Original Language), Analog; Italian (Original Language); Polish (Original Language)
Format: Color, NTSC
Running Time: 98 minutes
Release Date: 2001-04-03
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: Paramount
Studio: Paramount
VHS Movie Reviews of The Double Life of Veronique [VHS]
Movie Review: A beautiful work of art
Summary: 4 Stars
Throughout his career director Krsysztof Kieslowski worked as a documentary film maker, before doing his doing his most memorable works on film.
His movies offer recurring themes such as coincidences, reverbation, connection, and even parallel lives, and deliver a compelling fly on the wall look at human existence. With Veronique and his famous Blue, White and Red Trilogy, he has crafted some of the most visually memorable movies you will see. In fact, I saw this movie after seeing it recommended on Roger Ebert's website.
It is a simple truth, universally acknowledged that there is little in the world more beautiful and affecting than a beautiful woman in her pristine prime. So it is with Veronique affectingly portrayed by Irene Jacob.
Not only do see her in wonder, in bemusement, and nude and being made love to, like the camera in love with it's object, it's like we step into that life and see the things we would not normally see with an all seeing eye. This is how this movie excels as a work of art. We get to know who she is by how she is.
The only weakness I find is with the story and the characterisation. While Irene Jacob is a compelling presence, the other characters and the story do not develop particularly well.
A little disturbing is the introduction of the puppeteer, a somewhat shadowy and mysterious character, with somewhat of a stalker like obsession with French Veronique. He sends a shoelace through the mail.
Does he represent some sort of all knowing intelligence, and are his intentions towards her actually good? The sequence where he makes love to her while she is sad, could be interpreted a number of ways.
I find Irene Jacob fascinating, and she did another movie with Kiezlowski called Red. I consider that a much better movie, it tells a story, and draws parallels between the old judge and the young man, and I would call Red a masterful work. Red is part of a trilogy, yet it is a stand alone movie. It also garnered three Oscar nominations. Unfortunately, Red proved to be his last movie. I do recommend both movies.
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Movie Review: Cinematic perfection
Summary: 5 Stars
I fear that using words to try and describe the great essence of this film won't do it proper justice. I will restrict myself by only saying that this film is perfection on screen. Kieslowski was a true master...Movie Review: Astounding artistic achievement
Summary: 5 Stars
Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski made a dozen or so quality films, but beginning with The Double Life of Veronique, he suddenly catapulted into the artistic stratosphere inhabited by such greats as Fellini, Kurosowa, and Bergman. Starring Irene Jacob, whose acting is as superb as her beauty, the film is a complex metaphysical examination of twin souls briefly touching then parting and leaving only question marks. Jacob plays both roles, and Kieslowski moves at will between their two lives, sometimes with few visual clues. It may take several viewings to get their lives straight, but it is worth it. Long out of print, this film eluded me for about five years before I found a VHS tape, which I watched many times before it was released on DVD. If you like great filmmaking and don't mind subtitles, I highly recommend this film as I do Kieslowski's other masterpieces, the trilogy Blue, White, and Red, which are absolutely incredible films. (Jacob also stars in Red -- in my opinion the best of these three great films.) Though from Poland, Kieslowski made all of these films in French. Unfortunately, he passed away at the peak of his directorial powers.Movie Review: The "Meeting"
Summary: 5 Stars
In the film, Veronique catches just a glimpse of her "other self" as a bus pulls away, but that glimpse raises the question: suppose the two Valentines actually did meet? Such a meeting would pose some fascinating questions, I think. And the possibility of such a meeting made me recall two wonderful pieces of fiction by the master Argentinean poet/philosopher/writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). In two of his short stories such meetings actually do occur; "The Other" (from "The Book of Sand" - 1975) and "August 25, 1983" (from "Shakespeare's Memory" - 1983). Could Kieslowski have read these works?Movie Review: Excellent
Summary: 4 Stars
The Double Life Of V?ronique (La Double Vie De V?ronique) is the 1991 French-Polish film by Krzysztof Kieslowski, written by himself and Krzysztof Piesiewicz that was the presage for the greatness of the Three Colors Trilogy (Blue, White, and Red), and was an international sensation at both the Cannes and New York film festivals, for here is where the gilt-hazed camera work of Slawomir Idziak, the music of Zbigniew Preisner (although slyly credited to the fictional Van den Budenmayer in the film- a running joke within Kieslowski's later works), and Kieslowski's own vision first touched greatness- even if it is a conditional greatness, more of sensuality than sense. The film has been rhapsodized by international film critics as Kieslowski's `coming out' film, but one can see it is clearly a bridge between the direction he was headed with his tv series The Decalogue, and where he ended up in the Trilogy.
The film is not linear, which is the first thing that separates it from the typical Hollywood, and even contemporary European, films, but there is a cloying coyness to the film's reliance on synchronicities and contrivances that is more pronounced than in the Trilogy, where the errors Kieslowski made here were modulated. A film, or any work of art, that has a number of interpretations is exciting, but one with unlimited interpretations is a cheat, and reeks of narrative laziness. The Double Life Of V?ronique falls just short of going too far, but the relentless scenes of cogitation for the sake of cogitation- and revealing lead actress Ir?ne Jacob's lovely face and body, border on the obsessive; which would not be a bad thing, considering a good portion of the film's tale is on that topic, but the plain fact is that there is nothing new brought to the table on said topic.
Many critics have read so much nonsense into the film- such as the early death of Weronika absurdly representing Poland's absorption into the Soviet Bloc- in this most apolitical of films, that such readings only highlight the film's greatest failure- a lack of coherence. Yes, the film has to be given some latitude, narratively, but open endedness, to a fault, is still a fault. That Kiesloski did not repeat this in his later films is a recognition of this fact, and may explain his near obsessive need for tying up the ends of the Three Colors Trilogy in Red. Such things as how Alexandre got Weronika's possessions? Could he be the lover that Weronika was leaving Antek for? After all, he's famous and travels. Thus his later obsession with her twin, when he meets her, would have psychological resonance, as well as explain his stalking and sending of things. One can resist the temptation to figure out every last detail in a film like this, for much does not stand up to intellectual scrutiny, but to not ground the narrative in some bit of internal diegetic reality is to rob the film of its solid foundation.
The Double Life Of V?ronique ultimately misses greatness, if by a hair, because of these flaws- such as its too contrived, and lacking in chemistry, romance, for it often tries to force its implausible mystery at the viewer, rather than letting it evolve more subtly. In this way, its directed ending- even if more mysterious, is actually more in line with the Pulp Fiction sort of storytelling than that in the Three Colors Trilogy, which might explain why The Double Life Of V?ronique was highly awarded, whereas Red lost out to Quentin Tarantino's convoluted yet plot driven film at that year's Cannes Film Festival. The ending, where Alexandre tells V?ronique of his plan for a book similar to the film is simply too much, and such preciousness is a flaw in the screenplay by Kieslowski and Piesiewicz. One wonders what a greater screenwriter, like Bergman, could have done with these ideas. He certainly would have muted some of the obviousness, for even in Persona- another overrated, but greater, film, he does not go so far as to have the two aspects of what could be one person/persona played by a single actress. Thus, the film relies more on its strengths- which are undoubtedly great: the acting of the sensual yet innocent Jacob, and the evocative imagery, where the narrative's oneiric progression works best in its hermetic cosmos, crafting the dialogue of the two women from silence, even as the camera fixates on the radiant Jacob.
I wonder if Kieslowski was aware of the scientific studies done on twins separated at birth, and if this fact influenced this film, even to the point that the two women were, indeed, twins- one adopted by a Polish family, and the other by a French family? Such a hint that this might be the case could be evinced through further watchings, which I shall engage in, and which might just raise this slyly intriguing cocktease of a film above the bar for greatness. Until that time, however, I am left with the critical truism that while the narrative interior of a film can get away with not being analyzed too closely, the same cannot always be said for its exterior workings. This is why the film left me with a lack, yet why I also will view it again. Sometimes success and failure can have the same result. Other times not. Just ask Weronika/V?ronique.
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