Convergence

After the fade to black, we awaken in a Veronique dream. But it’s not her recollections, it’s a memory of Weronika — the upside down inside-the-superball view of a church, the same church her father was painting … the same painting she earlier described to her father. Kieslowski needs to reinforce something with us: Veronique’s connection to Weronika is not metaphorical, it is real and lingering. She still feels her soul twin’s presence even after death.

We next see Alexandre awaken on the bed. He stares a Veronique sleeping on the bed beside him, then he does something that strikes me as creepy (but perhaps is just everyday behavior for a French man) — he hovers over her. But actually, I should mention the brief shadow that traverses Veronique right before he begins his lurking. There doesn’t appear to be a natural light source that would cause it, making it yet another supernatural marker, a signifier, perhaps that something important for Veronique is about to happen.

Veronique awakes up, sees Alexandre’s face right above hers, and is remarkably not startled by it. She instead tells him that right before she fell asleep, she imagined a white sheet coming down on her, an allusion to his puppet show. Alexandre then declares “I love you” and Veronique responds in kind. He kisses her forehead. I want to point out that even this declaration (which by the way is deeply un-French, this is simply not something you tell someone until deep into a relationship) is a type of evasion from Alexandre. Instead of addressing her thoughts and feelings about being inside Alexandre’s puppet show, he declares love and begins physical activity.

So Alexandre is tenderly kissing Veronique’s face upside down now and, typical of a Kieslowski film, I find it more unsettling than romantic. I think Kieslowski wants his audience to believe that every man in romantic situations with his heroines aren’t worthy of them, but again, it could be my own French man/woman bias playing out again. But just to underscore that Kieslowski adopts this vibe as well, he will devote the middle chapter of his Three Colors trilogy (White) to a comedy all about relationship power dynamics.

We next see Veronique, calmly smiling, sitting in a chair, asking Alexandre “what else do you want to know about me?” He unhelpfully answers “everything.” Veronique then gets up, walks across the hotel room to a table, picks up her purse, then takes it to the bed and spills it out. It’s a very open, generous gesture, a way of saying that her life is an open book. But it’s also apparent that Veronique doesn’t pay much attention to the things she puts in her handbag that linger.

Alexandre pulls out chapstick, then some sunglasses she has been missing for awhile. Next he finds the superball and, of course, being the theatrical show-off he is, he does a sleight of hand with it. He says that he knows now why he chose to seek her out and it wasn’t the book. Veronique replies that she knows, and then utters the most important dialogue of the film. She says that she knows because all her life she has felt like she has always been in two places at once and because of this, she always has a feeling of what she needs to do. As mentioned in a previous essay, this is very much like the daimonion of Socrates, except in Veronique’s case, it is embodied as well.

Now Alexandre finds the negatives to some photos Veronique took on vacation — she tells them that they must be from Krakow. Alexandre declares that it’s a beautiful picture of her in the “big coat.” Veronique looks and tells him that it is not her, that she has never owned that coat. And then Veronique quietly breaks down on the bed and starts sobbing. This is an important moment for her. She finally comes to the realization that this feeling she’s had throughout her life is real, that there was a second her in the world.

I’m disturbed by what follows. Alexandre cuddles up close to her, which is fine, comfort in such a situation is normal. But then, very discretely, so much so that no clothes ever seem to come off, sex commences between the characters, entirely at Alexandre’s initiative. It is the saddest consensual (I certainly hope it was consensual) love scene I’ve ever witnessed, and it again interrupts Veronique’s thoughts and feelings with what Alexandre feels is necessary in the moment to shut the emotionalism down.