As I look back on “The Double Life of Veronique” and ahead to “Dekalog 9,” a curious throughline has emerged.
The simple way of viewing “Veronique” is making it Veronique’s story. She is, after all, the title character. In this way of looking at the movie, Weronika is the enabling character, she is the one who experiences the chaos and pain that makes it possible for Veronique to learn without experience. Even Alexandre’s puppet show presentation of the story leans into this interpretation, mentioning how Weronika is the one who touches the hot stove so Veronique knows not to do so.
This makes the film a sort of Christian parable. Weronika dies so that Veronique can be saved and fully experience life. This is also what Veronique believes in her heart, that she has a destiny and her actions are guided from beyond — she has to be with Alexandre because its part of her destiny, Weronika died to make this possible.
But consider how Veronique ends, not in peace or happiness, but in sorrow and mourning. Veronique does not feel joy in finding a pairing with Alexandre, she feels the loss of her other half. And she also feels betrayal, because her story has been taken from her by Alexandre. He has grabbed the lives of Weronika and Veronique and used them to create a children’s puppet show. The destiny, in the end, was nothing more than fodder for his plot.
So, I want to subvert this standard Christian reading of Weronika/Veronique and consider something more complicated. What if Weronika, the girl from Poland, that nation historically tied to the Jewish experience, symbolizes Judaism. Veronique, in turn, symbolized the life of Jesus, the story told by his disciples and by Jesus’s brother James. And Alexandre? He’s Paul … the one struck by a vision on the Road to Damascus, the one who retells the Jesus story, transforms him into Christ, adds Greek philosophy to the tale, steals the Jewish faith and, voila, creates the Christian religion.
It is the storytellers who have the final word, not the ones who have experienced the world. Just as Paul (otherwise known as Saul of Tarsus) subverted both Judaism and the life of Jesus in creating a religion a monotheism that the Roman would eventually adopt, Alexandre stole the Weronika/Veronique story and made their lives into something smaller. The magic and destiny of their existences was snatched from them by this puppeteer and child’s storyteller.
Wby would I suggest such a way of viewing “The Double Life of Veronique”? Because the next story to be told, “The Dekalog,” is about the Ten Commandments, a Jewish text that has been adopted over the years by the Christians, Muslims, and Church of Later Day Saints in creating their own theology and view of monotheism. “The Double Life of Veronique” was the first film Kieslowski made after that project and I believe it is likely thoughts brought up by his examination of “The Dekolog” were still fresh as he was formulating his next project.
And if he was so disturbed by issues of appropriation and intellectual theft, the transformation of the sacred Jewish texts had to be on his mind.
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