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Trailer for The Double Life of Veronique (video via youtube.com)

This is an exceptionally poor trailer for a remarkably good film, Krzystof Kieślowski‘s The Double Life of Veronique (La double vie de Véronique). I watched it for the second time a few nights ago and was dazzled all over again. Irène Jacob, who also stars in Kieślowski’s Red (Three Colors Trilogy), plays both leads, Weronika, a spritual and somewhat mysterious Polish soprano, and her doppelgänger, Veronique, an often melancholic French music instructor. Both women are intuitive and inexorably fueled by conviction and curiosity. Despite intriguing bookends to the film in which Weronika and Veronique overlap obliquely for a few seconds, their lives echo — almost rhyme — without knowing one another. The audience is left to decipher the uncanny link between them.

Cover of The Double Life of Veronique

Despite Kieślowski’s death in 1996, his films continue to provide essential oases in the Hollywood-saturated film industry. He ignores dramatic cliches and conventions in favor of a more stripped-down, more honest storytelling. As drawn to character as to plot (if not more so) Kieślowski invites us to wonder and question and yearn. The Double Life of Veroniqueis filled with this yearning. What am I talking about? In Annette Insdorf’s film commentary packaged with the Criterion Collection DVD of the film, she describes “rich characters moving through landscapes and situations that force them to grapple with something beyond their immediate circumstances…” Insdorf, a professor in the Graduate Film Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts and author of the Kieślowski biography Double Lives, Second Chances returns to this idea in an interview with the Columbia University Record:

“you’re made aware that there is something more at work than what the eye can see. At the risk of sounding fuzzy, I’ll suggest that there is a spiritual dimension embedded in his sensual textures… There’s a kind of yearning nostalgia for a world beyond the reach of the characters.”

Kieślowski’s unique screenwriting, directing and editing are complemented in The Double Life of Veronique by Zbigniew Preisner‘s mesmerizing operatic composition. This ethereal, haunting score weaves Weronika and Veronique’s parallel stories — as well as several layers of storytelling (puppeteering, children’s fiction, adult fiction, musical performance) — into a hypnotic and haunting tapestry. A tapestry that can be taken down from the wall when the film ends and taken to a chair by the hearth, wrapped around you while you ponder what you’ve just experienced, while you hum and question in the afterglow. Unless, of course, you can’t resist the temptation to leave the tapestry on the wall to watch all over again. I did!

Related articles

• doppelgängers in the double life of véronique (cmlt280.wordpress.com)
• Krzysztof Kieslowski – interview for Three Colours Blue (guardian.co.uk)
• the december project: the decalogue (saturdaynightscreening.wordpress.com)
• The White Stuff (slate.com)

Allen Ginsberg movie preview (via robertjamesrussell.com)

I’m ready… Bring it on!

Would you, could you, should you believe it? It’s true. Life’s been happening, oh-so-happening, and I’ve scarcely grazed the surface in my blog. The adventurous will know better, but for you, the sedate, the loyal, the unadventurous, I’ll apply the digits to the keyboard for an instant. No updates. Just a slap-dash drop-in zinger of the here and now.

So to start, how about taking the load off your shoulders and slipping into your ballet slippers for a little shuffle around your desk. Here’s a song and video to inspire the uninspired.

Now that you’ve restored your levity quotient, on to other tidy news-bits. Watched “About Schmidt” two nights ago. Ugh and wow, at once. Downer. And so clever about it. Great work. I highly recommend.

And then, even more delightful, in a different strain altogether and with a far more memorable soundtrack is Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” which will pull you out of your stupor and dazzle you with Parisian psychedelics of a sometimes racy, sometimes quaint, mostly lucid and totally engaging variety. It’s been released NC-17, a tolerable compromise to not cutting the original film. Also check out www.the-dreamers.com which dishes up a cool multi-media digital story complete with creative click navigation.

Also recently picked up Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors: A Memoir. I’d read Sellevision on the suggestion of a friend, a check-in on what young authors are writing and selling. Tripe, I thought at first, but gradually yielded to the entertaining, irreverent prose. A gas! Enough to propel me to purchase Running with Scissors: A Memoir, optimistic that this earlier work will be as engaging. His characters in the novel are all caricatures, and his memoir seems to do the same, despite its apparent status as non-fiction. Verdict’s still out. Thoughts?