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:
Felix wrote: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.
