The Double Life of Veronique -- What Makes This Movie Great? (Episode 182)

Substack -- please subscribe to support this channel: learningaboutmovies.substack....
Please follow me on Twitter for video releases and reviews: / drjoshmatthews
Letterboxd: letterboxd.com/joshmatthews/
Join this channel to get access to perks:
/ @learningaboutmovies
Understanding Movies 101 Course: joshmatthews.org/learn-more-a...
The Great Movies Series: joshmatthews.org/what-makes-t...
Comprehensive List of the Great Movies Series: joshmatthews.org/what-makes-t...
Movie Cliches Series -- Video Playlist: • Why Pianos Transform C...
The Great Directors Series -- Playlist: • Werner Herzog's 10 Gre...
Shot for Shot Analyses: • Understanding Movies 1...
Great Science-Fiction Movie List: joshmatthews.org/great-scienc...
Other Movie Lists: joshmatthews.org/topics/movie...
Disclaimer: All reasonable comments are welcome, including reasoned disagreements. You will be banned for foolish talk, harassment, and hate speech on sight; it's a tremendous waste of life. I believe in freedom of association and, by extension, freedom of dissociation from you.

[@adrianhough5059]

I love the ending when she touches a tree and her father senses she is home…..also Irene Jacob is stunning in this film

[@daiwalters]

Poetic, haunting, hypnotising, ravishing photography, gorgeous soundtrack. My favourite Kieslowski. A film that deserves the description "Masterwork."

[@toycamera6112]

Among the many lenses and reflections in the film, Kieslowski also implicates the camera as another lens that makes reality strange and beautiful. During the puppet show, I love the moment where Veronique looks away from the stage and looks through a glass border to see the artist as the true soul of the art piece. Later when Veronique sees her doppelganger through film, it may be the lens has finally revealed her to herself. Film, sex, grief, and the orbital lens of beautiful distortion are all connected with the unexpressed archetype of the self.

[@Eclatante11]

The best film that cuts so deep that after multiple decades of viewing it, I still get moved. My favourite.

[@achasingafterthewind]

This is Travis Leader. Thank you for making this video--I saw the film twelve years ago and was mesmerized by it, and I thought I had a general idea of what was going on in it, but figured you would provide some information that might clear up any questions. Your analysis of the film is roughly what I got from it. The film hints at any number of possible explanations for why these two virtually identical women exist apart from each other, but refuses to give a definitive answer and doesn't leave very strong evidence for the viewer to come to a definite conclusion either. As you say, it is a film that deals primarily in mystery, in the happenstance of our daily lives and the choices we make. Why do we meet this person at this time? Why did we choose this path, which took us to this place in our life? Had we chosen a different path, where would we be now? This could all be coincidence, it could be divine intervention, it could be our subconscious charting a path for us beyond our knowledge. Any of those three--and possibly all three and even more--could explain the events in the film, but the point is that that information is ultimately unknowable, so even with all of the interpretations you could draw about the meaning of this film, acknowledging that sense of mystery is essential. The Criterion booklet quotes excerpts from Kieslowski's book, Kieslowski on Kieslowski, and in it, Kieslowski writes that the film is "about emotions and nothing else" and that it only appeals to a certain group of people "who are sensitive to the sort of emotions shown in the film." As I alluded to in the previous paragraph, while the film is thought-provoking, it's not necessarily designed with a certain message in mind or structured all that logically--rather, the thoughts it evokes are emotional or spiritual ones, feelings, vibes, sensations--all of which are due in large part to the soundtrack and cinematography. Zbigniew Preisner was the composer for all of Kieslowski's films since No End (which I haven't seen), and his music throughout all of them has this haunting quality that is also beautiful and transcendent, and this is probably my favorite film soundtrack of all time. While much of it is strong and boisterous, it also has a delicateness and sensitivity that reflects both main characters and displays their fear and uncertainty once they sense the existence of the other and are confronted with the proof of that existence. Kieslowski worked with a lot of cinematographers throughout his career--nine with Dekalog--but there's a certain visual style that persists in all of them, and this has to be one of the most beautiful examples of that. Nearly every shot in this film shows deliberate attention to light, shadow, and color, and Kieslowski and his cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, chose to use a lot of gold/green filters that highlight those elements and give them an ethereal quality, as though we're watching something that is truly beyond this world. This is a film that is meant to be experienced and intuited, and the visual and aural components are right there at the front of the film to take us through that experience and have us feel the film just as much as think about it. Regarding the political interpretations of this film, the Criterion booklet also has an essay by film critic Jonathan Romney, and he briefly mentions that the film seems almost entirely unconcerned with the political world. There's a demonstration in Poland which sees Weronika lost in her own thoughts and walking the complete opposite way of everyone else, which is then followed by her seeing Veronique getting on a bus and being transfixed by this vision, as this is a far more interesting event. As you mention, there are other scenes of explicitly political things in which the camera briefly glances over to them, but then comes back to the characters and their personal issues and experiences. According to Romney, Kieslowski was a very active political filmmaker during the documentary period of his career, but by this time he had said he didn't care about Polish politics anymore. It's worth noting that for his next films, the Three Colors Trilogy, he took the ideals of the French Revolution, which were explicitly political and sociological, and interpreted them in terms of the personal and psychological. You could make the claim here that this is Kieslowski's statement that beauty or art or emotional truth or anything like that is superior, or at least of more interest, than anything political. I don't know if I would make that statement, just because I don't know enough about Kieslowski, but it is an interesting topic to think about.

[@pelarinbacosiii448]

I've been eagerly anticipating this one. I saw The Double Life of Veronique while I was in college all those years ago. I loved the mysterious tone, but I was certain that I had missed some deeper meaning, that maybe something lost in translation: I had so many questions. These days, I think of Rainer Marie Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." I still love the questions, and I'm still living the questions...

[@LearningaboutMovies]

most of life is mystery and will remain such. We have the great movies to remind us of that.

[@pelarinbacosiii448]

@@LearningaboutMovies Agreed! All great art can be a revelation.

[@63MGB1]

​@@LearningaboutMoviesGreat quote!

[@63MGB1]

My personal favorite of his films, so then obviously one of my overall favorites. Never grow tired of it and each viewing reveals additional rewards.

[@jessebbedwell]

This is one of those movies that I absolutely adore, in part because it is so mysterious. There is something about the European esthetic from this time period which revels in the notion of loose ends. One might go as far as to say that "there are no ends in this film, therefore nothing remains loose." It's an unfortunate trait of American filmmaking which has plagued us greatly for as long as the industry has existed. All of our stories must exist for a reason, whereas sometimes in European film, the point of the film is merely to exist. From this we see experimental ideas as presented through a quasi-narrative. This is what makes these films so expansive to my mind. That I can say something, and allow its expression to be profound and not have a subsequent string of sentences which gives a generic structural arc to the experience of witnessing ideas.

[@charlesfostercringe4903]

It's such a mind-bending movie that I don't know what to say. When I first saw it, I thought that Weronika was a real person and that Veronique was a dream or fantasy version of herself whom she saw as she died. But the film raises many questions, as you said, about predestination vs. free will (Does God, or some other puppet master, have a plan for us?), how we perceive the world (all that stuff about seeing things from different angles, though different lenses, from different people's points of view, or even using senses other than the typical 5, i.e. ESP/telepathy), reincarnation, dreams and the unconscious mind (maybe a collective unconscious), and the question of what people have in common and what makes them different (which ultimately is what we need to know to understand what makes us human). I seem to remember that you gave Mulholland Drive a poor review on Letterboxd. I'm not sure why. I loved that movie too, and it has some similarities with this one. Thanks for the video!

[@charlesfostercringe4903]

Donnie Darko is also a good one.

[@JLaSalle19]

One of my all time favorites. Have rewatched at least twice already.

[@that1guy375]

Absolutely love this film and Kieslowski is one of my favorite directors. You mentioned Dekalog, and it's a wonderful achievement in film. Back to Double Life, the scene where they "meet" in the square, is one of my favorite scenes period. Irene Jacob's face conveys all the emotions I think anyone would have in that situation, confusion, fascination and a hint of joy, thinking about the possibility you might have a double out there. Then the camera work. The frenetic energy as the armored forces try to control the group of protestors in the background, the way it swivels around Jacobs as the bus turns around. It's just staged perfectly. I've never thought about the simulated universe in regards to this film but it's an interesting idea. I've come away with multiple interpretations from my own viewings but due to the hazy mysterious nature of it, I don't have a strong hold on one.

[@fernandoguevara8258]

Roger Ebert said that the film is perhaps not meant to be understood, but felt.

[@brandonhamaguchi]

So interesting premise! You explained very well to get me intrigued. Thank you, will check it out. This reminds me a lot of what David Cronenberg explores on his psychological thriller Dead Ringers, an outstanding movie about identical twin gynecologists who spiral out of control.

[@LearningaboutMovies]

this is excellent. Both movies are about the same time, Dead Ringers coming first. I wonder how many "twin" movies are released about this time? Sounds like a graduate paper to me, or more.

[@skateboard446]

So glad I found your channel! I’ve been searching for a film prof led yt channel ever since I completed my undergrad in film theory. This film in particular was a top 5 for a prof I hold a lot of respect towards. If you haven’t already, I’d really love to see you do a deep dive on Nick ray, either his work as a whole or a specific film he made!

[@TheGreatGuigui32]

I prefer Blue of the same director, but The Double Life of Véronique is so unique ❤❤❤

[@Przemas1000lol]

I really liked the opening scene to this movie. It was a much needed introduction which I lacked in “Three Colors: Red.” I think the travel-through-wires animation might’ve just become obsolete. Also note the movie has an edited ending in the American distribution.

[@LearningaboutMovies]

thank you

[@lazzerbury]

great review man

[@LearningaboutMovies]

thank you

[@brauliomorrison]

My favorite!

[@trankien7477]

not my cup of tea, i didnt feel connected with the plot, but i respect the way the director told the story