359 The Double Life of Véronique

[fiddlesticks]

Philosophy rock stars.

[Brian C]

In fairness to MyNameCriterionForum, he didn't say that Zizek was a typical rock-star philosopher, he said that the essay was typical of Zizek's rock-star philosopher tendencies. [/pedanticism]

[Minkin]

Beaver- Bluray

[swo17]

Of course they would pick the NSFW caps.

[dad1153]

Am I blind or do I see little to no difference between the DVD and BD caps (Criterion versions)? I know when they're in movement still pics are a different story (it's not my first high-def rodeo) but, based on those Beaver caps, I'd go with the DVD (better packaging and thicker booklet) over BD. Haven't seen the movie (have wanted to since forever) but these caps have made me think twice about going the BD route.

[ccfixx]

Am I blind or do I see little to no difference between the DVD and BD caps (Criterion versions)? I know when they're in movement still pics are a different story (it's not my first high-def rodeo) but, based on those Beaver caps, I'd go with the DVD (better packaging and thicker booklet) over BD. Haven't seen the movie (have wanted to since forever) but these caps have made me think twice about going the BD route.

I'm pretty sure the difference is going to be more apparent when comparing the DVD and blu-ray side-by-side on larger screens. Criterion's transfer of the film from DVD to blu-ray probably isn't going to appear that significant on DVDBeaver's site until the DVD image (800 x 494) is enlarged to match the image size of the blu-ray (1920 x 1080) screen shots. This would result in loss of detail for the DVD image while the blu-ray is going to retain all of that detail.

CC

[swo17]

Yeah, a fair comparison would be of the BD capture at full size to a blown up version of the SD capture. I did something like this earlier for City Girl, where the BD and SD caps also don't appear to have much of a difference at first glance on Beaver's site. See here.

[Saturnome]

I have this zoom add-on with Firefox that I use to enlarge DVD caps to the same size of BD caps, I'm always using it on DVD Beaver.Here is what I get for Véronique, Blown up DVD vs full size Blu:
DVD
Blu

[dad1153]

^^^ Thanks. Not much difference but I can totally see the same image in motion looking better on BD (i.e. retaining the high rez while moving) than DVD (the blurry image will only get blurrier as movement takes place).

[Zot!]

^^^ Thanks. Not much difference but I can totally see the same image in motion looking better on BD (i.e. retaining the high rez while moving) than DVD (the blurry image will only get blurrier as movement takes place).

If you can't see the difference, I'm not going to tell you that you should, but to me this is night and day. Video Compression is a funny thing, because it fudges the picture enough so that it appears acceptable at a glance, but when you stare at it for a while, the artifacts really start to become annoying and very artificial to a film image. I currently only use a 37" TV at home, and DVDs look great from a distance, but when I get closer, I really wish I was watching a blu.

[aox]

blu-ray.com

[Hal_M]

Gorgeous transfer. Though I know it's argued, I found this transfer to be much more film-like than Artificial Eye's transfer (which, it should be stated, looked very good). Criterion's transfer exhibits more film grain, deeper blacks and an all-around sharper image. Both transfers show signs of very slight noise in the darkest scenes and corners, but never to distraction. While I've read arguments that AE's tighter grain structure and softer look is more accurate the the theatrical experience, I have to say Criterion's transfer is more in sync with my memory of the film projected in 35mm. And it is, quite simply, more pleasing to my eye. Detail is better, colors richer. Thanks Criterion. This one has made me very, very happy. Keep up the great work.

[stwrt]

Don't think I could sit through la double vie these days without the accompanying sultry tones of Annete Insdorf's commentary.

[FerdinandGriffon]

Just watched this for the second time and enjoyed it a great deal as sensory experience, even if I still find little in it that holds up to lasting reflection or consideration. I'm posting my explanation of the film's metaphysics, of what's happening in the film at a literal level. This is not what I think the film's about, what its subject is, just what I think is happening in terms of plot. It makes perfect sense to me, but I'm interested in what the board might have to say about it.

Weronika and Veronique have been tied together since birth. Their paths wander a little, but run parallel or very close to parallel in most significant situations. Thus they're both singers, thus they both have casual affairs as well as more troublesome ones that follow them around, thus they're both very close with their fathers. However, the timings of these moments of parallelism are not exactly synchronized, sometimes one or the other of them (or perhaps just Weronika) experiences something first and the double senses danger and diverts her course. The first example of this is Weronika's hand being burned: Veronique senses her pain and manages to avoid it. The most significant example though is Weronika's death. W is sick. When she collapses in the street and is approached by an ominous dark stranger, it is an omen of her approaching death. The revelation that this stranger is a flasher is also a revelation of how death will appear to her double (more on this later). She goes to the concert, dies, and the narrative switches over to Veronique.
Veronique senses the death of her double and decides to quit her singing career, knowing that continuing will lead to her demise. She goes to her teacher to tell him about her decision, and he tells her that she "has no right". She agrees, but the meaning of this agreement is at first elusive, until we realize that on some level she knows that she's cheating the system, that she has "no right" to avoid fate.
At this point in the narrative, a new major character is introduced, the marionettist. He manipulates dolls that resemble her, as well as a doll of an old woman, similar to the woman that keeps on crossing Veronique's path. Both dolls die in his puppet show. He starts to harry Veronique with phone calls, mailings, and mirrors. Eventually these lead her to an encounter with him in a cafe, where he tells her that he is just a novelist who was curious as to how far she'd follow him into the maze he'd made for her.
This doesn't check out. The marionettist knows everything about Veronique. He knows where her apartment is, about the string ripped from her folder, about exactly how she'll react to every one of his manipulations, even which hotel she'll take refuge in. He knows about the existence of her double, whose concert he plays for her. His knowledge does not even seem to be be limited to her world and actions. His sound collage seems to predict the car-bomb/engine malfunction that will mark the cafe so that Veronique can find it, and he has the timing of her arrival down perfectly so that the car disappears as she arrives. I can allow for a certain amount of "pure coincidence" in a Kieslowski film, but this goes far past that. And besides, his real significance and role were pretty blatantly spelled out from his introduction. The puppeteer is God/Death (a played-out metaphor, but at least it's prettily delivered), the grand manipulator, and he has come for Veronique, to set her back on the path she strayed from.
After they sleep together (thereby making him the double of his previous incarnation as dark stranger/Priapus in the Polish sequence) and he reveals her puppet and her story to her, she realizes that she cannot evade her fate. In the film's final sequence, she is given a chance to go home and say goodbye. She lays her hand on a tree, in a gesture of farewell to the physical world, while her father, sensing her eminent death (as Veronique did Weronika's) stands still, shocked into motionlessness.

[swo17]

It's a shame that most of the discussion of this Blu-ray release throughout the forum has focused on the absence of a couple essays and the packaging downgrade (which, yes, are both unfortunate, but at least the essays are easily available online) because even just going off of the transfer alone, this release is more or less one of the greatest things to have happened ever--a stunningly gorgeous film rendered about as perfectly on home video as I can imagine ever being necessary. Not to mention that even without those two essays this is still an incredibly stacked release. Definitely worth the double dip.

Also, FerdinandGriffon, your explanation sounds spot on to me. A few of those points hadn't occurred to me before (i.e. the significance of the flasher) but make perfect sense on reflection. I would argue though that all you describe sounds like it does hold up to lasting reflection!

[swo17]

Amazon shows a new DVD edition of this coming out on July 19 with a lower MSRP ($29.99). This may end up dropping the two essays and digipak of the original release, but I see no details about this at Amazon or on Criterion's website.

[domino harvey]

Original is OOP as of this week

[Tom Hagen]

Of course I sold the DVDs when I upgraded. Of course.

[movielocke]

I blind bought this after watching the Three Colors trilogy last year, and damn, this is one of the most beautiful Bluray transfers in the collection. And this is now my favorite Kieslowski, stunning work, such a masterful filmmaker.

I am so glad I didn't watch much Kieslowski when I was younger and first getting into film 10-15 years ago, I don't think I would have enjoyed or appreciated his work nearly as much as a teen or in my early twenties. Interestingly, I avoided his work for the same reason I avoided much of Terrence Malick's work, I'd moved to LA and wanted to see films that were legendary for their cinematography on 35mm if I could, not on pan& scan VHS or DVD letterboxed on 4x3 TV screens, so I waited and gradually caught many greats on the big screen as they would show up at repertory houses over the years.

bluray, and a large screen at home have started to help me fill in some of the gaps from films I'd missed or passed on or had never come around, it's transfers like this that make me feel like I have a projector whirring away behind me while I watch something that finally gives me the swept up sense of illusion I get when watching a film print. This may be my new favorite criterion transfer. Wow.

[cpetrizzi]

Kieslowski is one of my favorite directors. I saw DLOV when it came out at 21 and it's stayed with me throughout the next 21 years of my life. This film is just breathtakingly stunning and stays with you for a long, long time.

What's exactly missing on the blu-ray?

[Mr Sausage]

DISCUSSION BEGINS MONDAY, APRIL 27th AT 6:30 AM.

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[domino harvey]

I didn't vote for this because all I remember about this both at the time and after is "Well, it looked pretty"

[Gregory]

I find it hard not to be bowled over by how beautiful the film looks, and by Irène Jacob, but I've never found it to be more than impressive (even over-elaborate) execution of thin story material. The motif of doubles is extremely familiar, and here the coincidences and piled up to the point of being almost ridiculous: two women born on the same day (or moment), with the same name, same vocal capacity, and same appearance. I suppose the point is not whether all these mysterious coincidences are believable as much as whether they're impressive, moving, or create the groundwork for something ultimately more compelling to occur. For me, they simply don't.
During the era when this film was made, I can remember there being some broad interest in the mystical idea that there could be psychic connections between people in different places and that there could be inexplicable mental or emotional causation between people in different places at the same moment. To me, the device of Veronika's sudden death at a recital rendering Veronique unable to sing is hokey at worst and "so what?" at best. And the idea that there are mysterious forces controlling our lives and destinies is, in a contemporary context, just too "woo-woo," and people's everyday actions, predicaments, decisions, and chance occurrences are more compelling to me than coincidences and unfathomable forces that play a role in people's fate. I'm not arguing that these cosmic or fatalistic devices couldn't be part of a rich and convincing story, but it's difficult to do and I don't find that this film comes anywhere close.

[Sloper]

There's some interesting discussion on the existing thread, especially starting with Dylan’s post here.

I also wanted to single out this bit of one post, because it gets at an aspect of the film I think is really crucial:

And on my thought that all the best art is flawed, I found this in yesterday's paper, Don Paterson in the Sunday Times talking of Robert Wyatt's Sea Song. Best of all, it contained a couple of mistakes; it was the first time I had encountered such a thing on a record. Wyatt had reached for a note or a phrase his lovely, vulnerable cockney falsetto simply couldn't reach or cover; and he had left the mistakes in. I think that's where I learnt that a little audible failure in a great artist is a sign, a guarantee, that they are working just beyond the limits of their ability — and are therefore consumed by something greater than merely the desire to impress us. That does it for me.

In response to Gregory's post above: for me, this film is fundamentally about the tension between that sense that such coincidences hint at some transcendent supernatural ‘miracle’, and the sense that they are just hokey, banal plot devices. It’s the latter possibility that haunts both Véronique and Weronika.

It’s also this tension that makes the film so poignant, and prevents the main character from becoming too cloyingly blissed-out and mystical. Our first introduction to the adult Weronika sums this up nicely: the spectacle of her rapturous enjoyment of the music treads a perilous line between ‘enchanting’ and ‘grating’, but the ambiguity of that shot’s conclusion is what saves it. Weronika holds the last note for much longer than anyone else, and at first this seems to set her apart from the other women, to indicate that there is something special about her; but then the note goes on for an uncomfortably long time, like a string being pulled to breaking point. Weronika is soaked to the skin by this point (the first thing Antek says to her is that she should change out of her wet clothes), and her unfettered joy in both the music and the rain already feel a little dangerous. On the one hand, there is something beautiful in her that cannot be contained; on the other hand, she is singing herself into an early grave, and that grave (which we are made to occupy with her as it is filled in) will be terrifyingly earthly and limiting.

When Weronika reaches out to her double from beyond the grave, and drives her to follow Alexandre’s clues, the core tension persists. Is Véronique heading towards some form of contact with the ‘mystical’, and will her relationship with the puppeteer provide this, or will this turn out to be another banal, imperfect human relationship, not a meeting of kindred spirits but a clash of two earthly bodies that cannot really understand or communicate with each other?

The film, and Véronique, toy hopefully with the idea that it might be the former, but there is at least as much evidence that it might be the latter. For instance, what does it mean when Véronique finds the photograph of her double in Krakow? Clearly, this is part of what Weronika has been leading her towards, but what does the message consist in? The haunting image of Weronika, staring out in perfect focus against the blurred demonstration in the square, could be saying any number of things to Véronique. Perhaps it means that her mystical intuitions have been correct all along, and there is such a thing as a spiritual connection between people – perhaps that connection remains even though the double is now dead, which Veronique now realises she must be. (That is, she now knows how to interpret her earlier sense of grief and loss.) Perhaps that spiritual connection is maintained by her relationship with Alexandre, which is consummated at this moment. Or perhaps that consummation brings Véronique down to earth again, and she realises that she has not moved on at all since her sexual encounter with the young man at the start of the French section. Perhaps knowing that Weronika is dead, and then having sex with Alexandre, only consolidates her sense of loss, her sense that now she really is alone in the world.

Notice that Weronika’s face, in that photograph, is cold and unsmiling, as though it has just realised some chilling truth about reality. Moments before that, Weronika had been walking on air, carrying the music under her arm, looking forward to her audition. Then the music got knocked out of her hand by one of the demonstrators, ruining the moment. She looked unnerved after this. And then, as if to complete the experience, she saw her double… Notice also that Véronique crumples the photograph up when she realises what it means, but that it forces itself back into her field of vision (alongside the other relics of Weronika’s identity) while she is having sex with Alexandre. Weronika appears in focus, clearly defined, against that blurred background, but we saw earlier how vulnerable she was to the shocks and blows of cold reality, and perhaps we are supposed to feel that the photograph captures one last, lucid flash of life before the inevitable slide into blurred oblivion. It’s significant, as well, that the photograph is so small, and just one among many – it appears lost, easily missed, a partial and fleeing glimpse. Perhaps the woman in the photograph is telling Véronique, ‘I’m dead – and I’m not still with you – and this is all there is.’

I don’t think the film is definitive about any of this. Think about any one episode from the Dekalog: with each one, you can see how a ‘point’ or ‘message’ of some kind could be attributed to the ending, or how one could interpret the outcome of the story, or the state of the characters’ relationships, in a definitive and reductive way. And it’s not just that each episode defies our attempts to do this and leaves things on an ambiguous note, which in itself is an easy and sometimes lazy thing to do. That indeterminacy is itself the point. Dekalog 1 is the most didactic part of the series, but its message (if you can call it that) is that reducing existence to what can be measured is misguided and dangerous – which also means that we can’t read even this as a straightforward ‘moral’ without betraying the moral and emotional complexity of the story.

And that’s the problem with what I said above, where I tried to think through the different possible meanings we could attach to any given moment. As soon as you spell these things out, they become banal, which is exactly the problem Véronique faces.

What can be measured in these films, what we literally see and hear, amounts to something self-consciously banal, even hokey. It’s extremely telling that Alexandre decides to call his new puppet story ‘The Double Life of…’ and then hesitates to settle on a name. If he says ‘Véronique’, he knows that his new girlfriend will feel used and manipulated all over again. But she feels used anyway, because she knows the title might as well use her name, as the story uses her life. It crushes her to feel that her life has been boiled down into a text, a set narrative coldly designed, not by a supernatural force, but by a very human craftsman.

And Kieslowski seems to be saying that what is true of Alexandre’s puppet show is also true of this film. In committing these women’s story to celluloid, it is guilty of a similar sort of betrayal. The existing ending is, I think, better than the alternative American one, because the screen should fade to black – and stay there for an uncomfortably long time, echoing both Weronika’s uncomfortably sustained final note at the start and the blackness representing her death – at the moment when the music reaches that exact crescendo where Weronika died. Véronique’s hand seems slender and fragile against the huge tree, and she herself is more like the dead leaf we saw her holding as an infant. The fade to black doesn’t literally signal her death in the story, but symbolically it marks the limit of the film, and therefore of the (double) life upon which this film has imposed the limitations of narrative... Or it might still suggest something more transcendent spilling out of those limits into a plane of existence the film cannot access. The ending, like the film as a whole, achieves the incredible feat of being both chilling and exhilarating, leaving you unsure whether you have glimpsed something ‘beyond life’ or fallen into the void.

Finally, as was said several times in the thread linked to above, this is an extraordinarily personal film. To judge from other people’s reactions to it, its success or failure must depend to a great extent on whether it strikes a chord – without spelling anything out – in the individual viewer. I can see how the idea of the ‘double’ must strike many viewers as hackneyed and silly. I expected as much going into this film. Somehow, though, the way in which Kieslowski deals with the theme resonates with me in ways that are probably too personal to explain fully here. The idea that you are ‘not alone in the world’, that somewhere you have another ‘self’ living an independent existence, is one that I realised, watching this film, has always played some part in my psyche, in a way that (I hope) goes beyond straightforward narcissism, and beyond any notion of discovering an ideal partner or soul-mate.

Not only can I relate to this idea on a very deep level, I can also see what this film is getting at when it suggests that this notion of an ‘other self’ could serve both to cure and to exacerbate one’s sense of alienation. There is another self out there, so you are not alone…but that other self is just you all over again. It’s both a comforting affirmation of your greatest hope, and a horrifying confirmation of your greatest fear.

[FrauBlucher]

Sloper, terrific analysis. Thanks.