I’ve been thinking today about possibly veering into a short series about the Krzysztof Kieślowski film made directly before “Three Colors: Blue”, called “The Double Life of Veronique.” When I was in Melbourne, Australia a couple years ago, I was wandering through their modern art museum complex, which included a museum of cinema, and noticed that this film was playing that day. The scheduling didn’t work out to watch it then, but thinking about the movie led me to rewatch “Blue” on the flight home — which led to me drawing the connections between “Drive My Car” and that film.
But rewatching “The Double Life of Veronique” today, it struck me that it too bears some resemblance to “Drive My Car.” It too opens with a very long prologue — a roughly 35 minute segment in Poland where we follow a young woman named Weronika, a choir singer who is about to get her big break in a vocal performance of a symphony by a fictional 18th century Dutch composer known as Van den Budenmayer. Please excuse a somewhat lengthy digression on this detail.
A Kieslowski fan site explains the importance of this character:
Van den Budenmayer was a Dutch composer. He was born in 1755 and died in 1803. We know what he looked like from the engraved portrait that appears on recordings of his music but his first name has never been revealed. The most pertinent thing to know about him is that he never existed at all outside a handful of films, being the invention of director Krzysztof Kieslowski and soundtrack composer Zbigniew Preisner. A composer invented to enrich a scenario isn’t usually worth mentioning but Van den Budenmayer is a cinematic rarity, a recurrent presence in four different films, only two of which have any internal connection to each other. This is a common technique in literary fiction—writers love to invent details which turn up in otherwise unconnected stories or novels—but it’s uncommon in cinema.
So, this character first appears in Kieslowski’s 9th episode of The Dekalog, his 10 part Polish TV series based on the Ten Commandments. In this episode, a loving married couple learns that they can no longer have sex, so the husband in question is given permission to seek out a new sexual partner. He turns his attention to a young woman who sings in a chorus performing the work of this composer Van den Budenmayer. The singer has a heart condition … and I don’t want to give away anything more, because I love The Dekalog and think every living human should seek out and watch the entire series.
But, this character in the story inspires Kieslowski to create a similar character, Weronika, for this film. She too is performing the Van den Budenmayer symphony. When we get to “Three Colors: Blue,” Van Den Budenmayer’s music is the inspiration for the unification of Europe composition at the center of the film. And then it all comes full circle in “Three Colors: Red,” and I’ll let the Kieslowski fansite explain it:
Everything comes full circle in the final part of the trilogy, with fashion model Valentine (Irene Jacob, the star of The Double Life of Veronique, again) listening to the music from Dekalog 9 in a record shop, a piece which the Red soundtrack album has titled as Do Not Take Another Man’s Wife. This is doubly significant for a very tangled story since Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant), the retired judge that Valentine meets, was betrayed by his girlfriend years before in a predicament mirrored by that of a legal student (and future judge) who lives near Valentine. The embittered Kern spends all his time listening to his neighbours’ phone conversations with a scanner; he also likes Van den Budenmayer’s music enough to have an album lying around although we never see him listening to it. We do, however, hear the Dekalog theme when Kern is alone in his house. (The camera lingers briefly on the composer’s portrait but it’s left to eagle-eyed viewers to make sense of that “…ayer” on the album cover.) The later scene in the record shop seems superfluous at first but I take it as a sign of the growing friendship between Valentine and Kern, especially after Valentine has melted Kern’s cynicism enough for him to tell her about his past. I only spotted the connection with Dekalog 9 after watching all these films again, also the connection between Kern and the surgeon, both of whom are victims of infidelity who eavesdrop on phone conversations.
Ok, end of lengthy digression that actually has nothing to do with the plot of any of these films.
Back to “The Double Life of Veronique” and the singer Weronika. Little over 30 minutes into the film, something shocking happens — the protagonist has a heart attack in the middle of a musical performance and dies. This is something Ryusuke Hamaguchi will repeat in “Drive My Car,” killing off Oto shockingly early in the film, only to reveal to the audience that everything that happened in the first 40 minutes of the film was pre-credits prologue.
Kieslowski does not pull the same trick, but the main plot of his film only begins after Weronika’s death. Well, kind of. You see, Weronika has a double — and character also played by the actress Irene Jacob named Veronique. She’s French, but during a visit to Poland, she briefly catches a glipse of her doppelgänger. This will become important towards the end of the film.
But what makes this movie fascinating is that Veronique feels an intuitive connection to Weronika. She is overcome by grief when her double dies and begins to sob. To heal from this loss, Veronique makes the intuitive leap that she needs to fall in love. And that begins the main story of the film, a mysterious love story between her and a puppeteer who sends her clues, leading towards their eventual meeting.
To tell more of the plot would not really explain much, because everything important about the film is in the way it is told, not what is told. It’s a film about inexplicable connections and an odd sense of destiny. Like “Drive My Car,” it’s a ghost story, in a sense. Weronika haunts every scene and there are clues throughout that her spirit is influencing the way Veronique sees the world.
So, do I want to take this film scene by scene? I may love this movie too much to do that. There’s no explaining “The Double Life of Veronique,” it simply needs to be experienced in all its strangeness and ambiguity.
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