Doubling

The French title of the film suggests a double meaning — La Double Vie de Veronique. Double Vie (vee) is double life … but it sounds so close to Double V (vay), which is French for W. Or, to put it another way, La W de Veronique … Weronika, the Polish version of the name.

The film opens with two scenes of wonder, seen from the perspective of little girls. We hear mothers’ voices speaking to the both, lost mothers. It is never mentioned explicitly in the film, but both Weronika and Veronique lost their mothers very early in life.

We take Weronika’s perspective as she stares at a horizon at dusk, upside down. We hear a flute in the background, the theme that will be omnipresent. The mother’s voice says “That is the star we are waiting for to start Christmas Eve. Do you see it?” Then see points out a haze that is not at all haze, but millions of stars. And we see a reflection in the window of the girl and see that her mother has been holding her upside down. Her mother asks her to point at the star. She does and smiles.

Then we fade into another girl and a French mother’s voice. We see a big brown eye staring at a leaf. The girl holds what her mother calls the first leaf. She tells her it is springtime and soon all the trees with have leaves. The mother tells her to notice how the leaf has veins down one side.

We next hear a choir and, during the title credits, see a flash forward of Weronika walking … although the film is blurred and stylized, we cannot quite pick out what is happening, only that at one point someone runs into her and papers start sprawling on the ground. Why this flash forward? Because it is in this moment of happenstance that Weronika and Veronique come face to face for the only time. But this is still in our future. We are back to the “present” in film time and that choir. Weronika is singing, joyfully.

So joyfully, in fact, that when she starts to feel raindrops a few seconds into her solo, it only seems to heighten her happiness. Weronika seems to be that same wonder-filled girl we saw in that opening scene. She carries an astonishing sense of confidence, a deep conviction about her place in life. I don’t know if it is strictly religious, but it feels that way. She tilts her head up slightly to the rain, even as it strengthens. She appears to be thanking the heavens for this dramatic accentuation of her performance, and while girls behind her scurry for cover, she remains in place, holding her final note as long as the music requires.

We next see four girls from the choir laughing as they walk the street after the performance. It is still raining. They are met at an intersection with a flat bed truck carting off a statue, a relic of the just-ended communist era in Poland. We can see in the distance that this is a sun shower, adding a magical element to the occurrence and a soft gold glow to the sky. This film came right before the Three Colors trilogy of Kieslowski, and some critics have remarked that it easily could have been entitled Gold and made the Fourth color, given how heavily the film’s palate is influenced by gold tints.

Weronika then meets her boyfriend in an alleyway, in a scene that looks astonishingly similar to the iconic lover’s kiss sequence from “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” He tells her she sang beautifully. She thanks him, but clearly yearns for physical touch more than words. He kisses her nose, then her lips. The film cuts to a medium shot, where Weronika wraps her right leg around him. He tells her she should change, she says “come.” We do not know how long these lovers have known one another, but her words carry weight, as if this were their first time.

We cut now to the couple in bed, the camera focused on Weronika’s finger, which is wrapping around a string of a blanket. Strings will be a recurring motif in the film. From this shot we can also see a scar on Weronika’s finger, the focal point of the lovers’ discussion. Weronika hides her head and says she’s ashamed of it … she’s ashamed of this tiny deformity, even as she’s lying naked for the film going audience to see all her beauty.

After giving us a good 15 seconds of Irene Jacob beauty bathed in gold/green filters, she tells the story of the scar — that her girlfriend’s father slammed the door on it, right after her high school exams, specifically one on piano, leading her to black out. We then hear the theme flute again and Weronika looks up at a poster of herself. Or is it herself? The photo, which I assume her boyfriend has hung on his wall, seems to make her happy.

We next see Weronika running, somewhat frantically. Why is she in such a hurry? Is she late for a curfew at home, perhaps? The next shot is of a painting on the wall, likely by her father. She awakes in a panic, holding her neck. This feels like a premonition of a heart attack. We next see a round eyeglass — Kieslowski again with his circle motifs — looking down at a painting. It is her father at work, drawing a building in colored pencils that we will see much later in the film. Weronika pulls back the curtain that divides her room from the house and calls to her father at work.

One recurring feature of Kieslowski films is very loving relationships between fathers and daughters — and also between father-figure men and younger women. Kieslowski had a very close relationship with his daughter, but also was famous for how affectionately he took care of, and protected, the actresses in his films. He mirrored those feelings in these kinds of pairings, and the father/daughter relationships in this movie are especially heartwarming, given that the dual protagonists lost their mothers.

She tells her father to tell Antak, who I assume is her boyfriend, that she has to leave and that he will be sad. Her father asks back “and you?” She does not answer that, hinting at some tension between them. She says that she was happy that auntie called but felt back that she wasn’t feeling well. She will be going to visit her in Krakow. The father asks “did you ask her to call?” He smiles and she laughs in return, hinting that this trip might be a setup.

But maybe this desire for distance with Antak has nothing to do with him. What Weronika says next is very important, but not entirely clear. She says that she has a feeling that she is not alone. Her father seems puzzled — of course you are not alone. But Weronika has an intuition she cannot quite articulate, that she is carrying a connection with her that feels protecting, that makes her feel safe being alone.

“Like I’m not alone in the world.”