La Double vie de Véronique (1991) - film review

Weronika is a young concert singer who lives in Poland with her father.  One day, she glimpses a woman on a coach who looks exactly like her.  A short while later Weronika dies suddenly of a heart attack whilst giving a concert recital.  Meanwhile, her double on the coach, Véronique, has returned to Paris, where she works as a music teacher and takes singing lessons.  For no apparent reason, Véronique is suddenly prompted to give up her singing career.  Soon after, she watches a marionette performance, in which a young woman dies and come back to life as a butterfly.  She then receives a mysterious phone call from a stranger and unexpected items through the post.  Feeling she is in love without knowing why, Véronique pieces these clues together and meets up at a station café with the marionette player, Alexandre.  He tells Véronique of a story about two young identical women born on the same time, living miles apart.  One of the women dies, and the other lives, inexplicably sensing her loss...

Anyone who was impressed by Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs trilogy will appreciate this earlier film, which is made in a very similar vein.  It also features the captivating Irène Jacob, who won the best actress award at Cannes in 1991 for her role in this film.   It is a baffling yet thoroughly absorbing work, anchored more firmly in the twilight zone of the paranormal  than in the real world.

Kieslowski takes a simple idea – the notion that each one of us has an identical twin somewhere in the world – and fashions a haunting and poetic tale of seemingly endless profundity about it.  The film appears to have the simplicity of a children’s fairy tale, yet, if you look closer, layers and layers of detail become apparent.

The amber-drenched photography, the sweeping camera movements and the recurring symbols (for example, the pedestrian crossing) all serve to give the impression that we are experiencing a dream, or, at least, we are looking at reality through a distorting prism.  Because it feels like a dream, there is no need to explain what we see – indeed any attempt and trying to make sense of the narrative would be a futile exercise.

Like much of Kieslowski’s work, La Double vie de Véronique is less about telling a story than providing an experience.  Somewhere between ghost story and a traditional romance, the film manages to latch onto the spectator’s senses without feeling the need to justify itself.  At one level, it is a magnificent abstract work of art; at another, it is a captivating piece of cinema which leaves a lasting impression.

© James Travers 2001

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?