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Ion Martea
posted 14 March 2006

There is so much talk about the lack of great roles for actresses over the age of forty-five, that few remember the lack of great roles for actresses below twenty-five. If they want to show the full range of their talent, younger actresses are mainly forced to find some form of substance in two-dimensional characters defined primarily by innocence and virginal beauty. In The Double Life of Veronique, Krzysztof Kieslowski managed to break the curse and made a true gift to Irène Jacob, a well-written role that brought her the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991, among other accolades.

Jacob plays one character, materialised in two identical bodies. The first is Weronika, a Polish girl with an angelic voice, that is crystallised not through years of training, but through true passion. She is in love with Antek (Jerzy Gudejko, in a beautifully restrained performance), her father, and her aunt. She is also suffering from a genetic heart problem, which caused the death of all the women in the family while they were in apparent 'good' health. Weronika, however, feels that she will be saved, as if a guardian angel always ensures her security, exempts her from loneliness. One day, she sees her angel - a girl sharing not only her physical traits, but also her desire to love, her desire to live with somebody watching her in loneliness - Véronique. The angel, a young French girl, just makes photographs, capturing evidence about the Poles' revolt against Communism.

The story is more concerned with this French music teacher, falling in love with a puppeteer-writer, Alexandre Fabbri (Philippe Volter). Véronique finds herself trapped in love, but also trapped in a man's desire to establish the veracity of telepathy among humans. Kieslowski does not hide behind the curtain on this occasion, and follows along with his characters the search for unity. That is why the revelations and circumstances do not appear as contrived, but necessary devices to understand the dialectics of human consciousness.

The Polish director believes that one can understand humanity not through its differences, but through the similarities. We do not judge each leaf independently in order to understand the beauty of a tree's crown. We simply look how an amalgam of similar items manages to create a most original creation. The inevitable small differences serve primarily an aesthetic purpose. The same is true for humans. We are not all white, doctors, cynics, or what not. Yet, we are all capable of empathy, we all feel pain, we all have dreams, and eventually we all fall in love. The rest is just circumstantial, insignificant detail is what gives birth to mundane beauty. The true spirit is untouched though, left to float quietly, escaping our ability to grasp it.

Today's audiences might compare Kieslowski's film to Jeunet's Amelie, yet on this occasion, the aesthetic spirit is meaningful in itself, rather than just complementing an entertaining romantic comedy. Watching The Double Life of Veronique one is inescapably forced to appreciate the film's artistic qualities. Slawomir Idziak's expressive cinematography breathes life through Zbigniew Preisner's stunning soundtrack. The spectator is charmed into a chimera in which nothing but pure beauty matters.

It is rare for a film to succeed so well, despite leaving so much of the plot off-screen. But Kieslowski captures a spirit that is so faithful to the spectator's emotion, that in Jacob, we will cease to glance at an one-dimensional character, but gaze into the inner depths of our souls. Veronique is all of us, lonely beings trapped in undeveloped lives, ever hoping that one day we will be able to grasp the meaning of it all. Until then, all we are left with is an angelic voice singing with utter simplicity, buzzing reassuringly in our ears. This voice will be the last thing we will ever hear.