两生花

This blog post will focus on the film The Double Life of Véronique(Kieslowski, 1991). It starts with 30 user reviews from Douban, selected based on the length and depth of the reviews, and analyses what the different views of the audience on the film are. Then, we look at one of the opinions and find examples from the literature and the film to expand on it.

In the few reviews I've checked, the biggest thing for viewers of this film is that the director focuses more on the emotion of the film than the narrative. What the viewer gets is a sense of feeling and emotional change that goes beyond the story itself. The key words to focus on in these reviews are life, soul and loneliness. The viewer writes, "The power of life deserves to be celebrated." This is a theme embedded in this film, and one that is often linked by the viewer to the director's other works. With regard to the soul, the viewer prefers to see the Polish Véronique as the presence of the soul. Just as the French Véronique is alive, but her soul has left her. This is a kind of destiny that the film is trying to convey. The soul will always be far from the reality of life, and because of this, loneliness is always deeply buried in life. The music in the film successfully illustrates this sense of unknowable, mysterious fatalism. Secondly, although the film is about the individual, it is also perceived by the viewer as a metaphor for politics. There are very few scenes about politics, the only basis for which seems to be the geographical location of the two Véronique's. The Polish Véronique represents Eastern Europe and the French Véronique represents Western Europe. The French Véronique is shocked and saddened when she discovers the Polish Véronique. So it is not difficult to imagine the mixed feelings of Western Europe as it confronts Eastern Europe again at the end of a time of great change. Finally, there are also very few reviews in which the film, and the names of the protagonists, are associated with religion.

The following point I would like to further elaborate is that the film's story of two similar-looking female protagonists is a search for the soul, a search for the self and a continuation of life. The director himself was asked what he was looking to capture and he replied that it could be the soul, a truth that I have not found myself (Knight, 2009). In the film, the Polish Véronique, from the very beginning to her final violent death on stage, is in fact the culmination of the perception of her own soul. She cries after making love, she voices her doubts about life in a conversation with her father, all originally common problems encountered by human beings. The soul is bound up in the body. As she does her scale voicing exercises, he tugs a thin band between his fingers tighter and tighter as the pitch gradually rises, as if it were about to break.

This is a sign that the soul is trying to break out of the prison of the body, and in the end she succeeds, allowing the soul to break out of the prison of the body as the song drifts higher and higher. But on stage, the high notes come to a screeching halt and the body collapses, releasing the soul to float lightly and freely over the concert hall. Here, the director has filmed from the first point of view, subtly conveying the feeling. Véronique, far away in France, is making love to her boyfriend when she suddenly feels a palpitation and then falls into a deep sadness. Véronique's soul in Poland dies, in the climax of the music, while Véronique in France is hit by a cold wave of death in the climax of the lovemaking. With a curiosity for life and a desire for a soul, she sets out on a path to find hers.

In general, the film can be divided into two parts. The first half is about Véronique in Poland and the second half about Véronique in France. The Polish Véronique is portrayed as a self-absorbed person, narcissistically enjoying the innocent and uninhibited pleasures of a young person, indifferent to the threat of death (Derry, 2010). She and herself always appear in a mirror relationship in the film (Wilson, 2017). Almost every time we see Véronique, she is not alone, but obscured by her reflections in photographs, glass doors and windows. Even when her boyfriend is making love to her, the camera focuses on Véronique's calm face and the photograph she is gazing at, the one of herself almost tenderly overlooking the scene.

In the first part of the film we always see a double image of Véronique, perhaps as a kind of self-searching. In this sense, Véronique's double life is an optical illusion, a shadow of the virtual over the so-called reality (Wilson, 2017). When the Polish Véronique leaves, the French Véronique slowly appears in the film as a re-perpetuation of her life. She is a stand-in for the Polish Véronique in terms of age, appearance and personality. And like Polish Véronique, she is imaginative and sensual and is also a musician, a primary school music teacher who teaches her pupils the same songs, highlighting the already obvious mystical connection between these two people. Also, while watching the puppet show, the French Véronique is drawn to the puppet in the guise of a butterfly, as if to tell the audience that the Polish Véronique has come to her in the guise of a butterfly.

Overall, the film is very poetic. With the creation of the two Véroniques by the director, the audience can get the feeling of watching the film in the first person and have a more detailed understanding of the characters' emotions.

References:

Derry, J. (2010). Incorporeal Encounters and Affective Relationality in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Véronique.eTopia.

Kieslowski, K. (Director). (1991). The Double Life of Véronique[Motion Picture]. Sidéral Productions.

Knight, C. J. (2009). “For Once, Then, Something”: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “The Double Life of Véronique” and the Apophatic Beyond.Literature/Film Quarterly,37(4), pp. 283–294.

Wilson, E. (2017).Image in Crystal: La Double vie de Véronique. In G. Hawkins (Ed.), Memory and Survival: The French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski (p. 15). Routledge.