Review: The Double Life of Veronique

By Frank McDevitt


Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique is a masterwork of mood, more concerned with tapping in to deep wells of feeling than with concrete ideas and concepts. Kieslowski was a filmmaker who dealt more in intuition than intellect, which is not to say that his films don’t contain material worth chewing on intellectually, just that they resist literalist or symbolist interpretation and exist more in realm of sensual experience. The Double Life of Veronique is perhaps the most sensual and mood-oriented film the director ever made, which means that the film can’t be discussed in any kind of “rational” or symbolic way, since the entire experience is meant to invoke feeling, rather than spark debate.

The film opens with Veronika, played by Irene Jacob, a young Polish choir singer with health problems living in Krakow. Veronkia is nagged by feelings of unease, feelings that are amplified when she sees her double on a tour bus, snapping pictures in the streets of Krakow. When Veronika’s heart condition causes her to collapse and die on stage in the middle of a performance, the action moves to Paris where her double, Veronique, also played by Jacob, lives and works as a schoolteacher. Veronique was also a vocalist, but when Veronika dies she suddenly quits her voice lessons, for reasons that even she seems unaware of. Veronique feels the death of Veronika somewhere in her being, and as she explains to her father, she sometimes feels as though she’s not alone on the world. The central narrative of the film, such as it is, concerns Veronique’s infatuation with a puppeteer and children’s book author whose interest in her might not be quite what it seems.

The need for logic or a cut and dry plot would simply spoil the films central pleasures, however. Such a prosaic mode of thinking has no place in a film that is chiefly concerned with abstract feeling and aesthetic beauty; if one were to posit that The Double Life of Veronique is “about” anything, one might just as easily say that it’s about the appreciation of beauty (beauty in music, painting, or puppetry, as well as the beauty of its own visual compositions) as it is about the life of one woman who has lost her exact double somewhere else in the world. Kieslowski uses a color palate comprised of intense reds and greens, and each frame of the film evokes a feeling of deep sensuality. Though the intense stylization can sometimes feel a bit overheated (the sporadic use of the fish eye lens is a bit much), the overall experience of The Double Life of Veronique is nothing short of unforgettable.

90/100 - Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique is a masterwork of mood, more concerned with tapping in to deep wells of feeling than with concrete ideas and concepts.

Philadelphia Film Critic. I'm a student and writer living in Philadelphia, and film has always been one of my passions. Film, more than any other art form, can communicate the experience of what it means to be a human being in a way that's universal and beautiful. Without film, life would be far less rich, and its experiences would be far less extraordinary.