Is There Someone Else Out There? The Double Life of Veronique

I saw it with Barry (a family friend) at a great little movie theatre on the University of Chicago campus. He really wanted me to see it. He had loved it … so when I was living in Chicago, I traveled down to the campus, met up with him, and sat in a tiny 40-seat movie theatre, watching this miraculous and strangely wrenching film unfold.

I felt NAMED by the film. I took it personally. This rarely happens. Doppelgangers … soulmates … kindred spirits … feeling alone – not just lonely – but existentially ALONE … and sending that there might be a missing piece … and that that missing piece might be – someone I’ve never met yet. But someone I know intimately. Someone who … is me, only in the reverse. Or me in the past. How to get all of that into a story? The Double Life of Veronique does.

Once upon a time, I stood on a sidewalk, and a man came up to me, looked at me, smiled, and asked, “Are you waiting for someone?” He was truly looking for an answer. He wasn’t being clever, it wasn’t an overt come-on. He wondered if I was waiting for someone, because I was just standing there. And, indeed, I was waiting for a friend of mine. I looked up at him, and felt an odd rush. Not just familiarity – not like: “Oh, he reminds me of so-and-so… and therefore I feel comfortable with him …” No. What I felt in that moment was weirder and deeper than that. It was actual recognition. A soul-rush. This stuff is not easy to talk about. I’m scornful of the whole concept of soulmates .. and yet, like the great Joan Armitrading has said: “I am open to persuasion”. That moment with that man was eerily familiar. Deja vu. I’ve been here before. I looked at him and I knew him. This is not just retrospect talking since I know the end to that story, and I know where he and I ended up “going”, in terms of relationship. This was my experience in that moment. I wrote it in my diary that night (evidence!): “He seems very familiar to me. But it’s more like I

recognize

him.” Such moments cannot be explained. I truly think he was a part of me somehow – not in a codependent way – but in a way that thwarts the space-time continuum – like: we are PARTS of each other … and when we met, we just fit. Ah. There is that piece I have been looking for. Such closeness and kinship is perhaps unnatural, perhaps it cannot be sustained. It obviously couldn’t be sustained in our case. I don’t feel the need to have an answer on this one. It can’t be answered, first of all, and any answer would seem too easy or simplistic. All I can say is that I knew him. And once I had met him, and once we became friends, I realized the sensation – which was actually quite specific: I had been missing him all along.

La Double Vie de Veronique is about these very difficult ephemeral now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t sensations.

Things come to us in a dream – images, sensoral details … and they are filled with meaning. In the light of day perhaps they seem nonsensical … but in the dream-world, it is as though a message is trying to get through.

That was what that movie felt like to me. I watched it, and I could feel my heart breaking. I’m not talking metaphor here. I’m saying that I sat in that movie theatre, and I felt something crack.

It was as though a message was trying to get through.

I write all of this because I have learned that Lincoln Center is doing a whole Krzysztof Kieślowski season this April … and I just read this piece in The New Yorker about it – and about Veronique in particular. I read it, and all of my emotions about the movie came flooding back. I love Anthony Lane anyway, I always read his stuff – but I was particularly interested to read his thoughts about this film. He speaks of the power of his first viewing of the film back when it first came out (early 90s)- and he was really curious to see if it would hold up. Lane writes that the first time he saw the movie it held him in a “discomforting trance”, and I can’t even begin to say how much these words resonate with me, how much that was my experience of it. It was a trance. And yet … it was kind of awful. I felt trapped by the film, and yet there was something so evocative and poetic about it that I couldn’t look away.

Fans of the director praise his metaphysical powers, but that claim, in any filmmaker, is to be approached with caution. The sole reason that Kieślowski, like Bergman, has earned the right to offer us glances into the beyond is that his grip on the here and now is so unerring; witness Veronika’s scraping of dead leaves along the top of a wall, the splash of her shoes in a sun-flashing puddle, the trailing end of Veronique’s scarf in a hospital corridor, and the closing shot of her palm on the bark -the reliable roughness-of a tree. As you watch the golden flutter of light that darts around Veronique’s room, you might reasonably wonder if Kieślowski was schooled in metempsychosis, or spiritual transmigration, but you could also ask whether, as a boy, he had listened to tales of Tinkerbell. The film is filled to dazzling with the vitreous and the translucent; the flaw running down the window of a Polish train seems, in some mystifying way, as momentous as a rift in space-time. We see through a glass darkly, and often confusingly, but at least we see.

I own the film and yet it’s not something I choose to watch. It’s too much, in a way. My memory of watching it the first time also is a very sensoral one … I remember the rain, I remember the strange odd images his camera lingers on, the unexplained moments … but isn’t life full of unexplained moments? Don’t very very small things suddenly take on huge poetic meaning?

Lane goes on, beautifully:

So has this vision worn well? It seems more politically suffused; fifteen years ago, I was too dumbfounded, or too plain dumb, to realize that the very idea of the movie’s transit between Western and Eastern Europe was a declaration of newly acquired liberty. There is a clue in a postmark on an envelope that Veronique inspects with a magnifying glass: “1990,” it reads, the year in which the Communist Party of Poland was finally dissolved. The bodies of its citizens, as well as the souls of its singers, were henceforth free to travel where they desired. Could it be that our two, mirrored heroines were the product of a divided continent, and that, with the melting of borders, only one of them was now required?

Shattering. The title of Lane’s review is telling. There’s something there I don’t want to look at anymore, which is perhaps why I am so anti-soulmate.

That’s what the film makes me think of. Lane’s title is accurate.

And Lane ends his review (here’s the link again) with a snippet of a poem by Czeslaw Milosz – and the perfection of it, in the context of not only the film, but the context of Milosz’s own history – – took my breath away. Milosz is the perfect poet to be quoted in that review. In more ways that one.

Yet another film festival on my radar. I’ve gotta go see this one again. It’s wrenching … and the thoughts it brings up are barely pleasant. It’s one of the loneliest movies ever made. An existential ache. I never believed in that stuff until it happened to me. There is nothing like the loneliness of missing someone who has revealed himself (or herself) to be essential. Essential to you not in an everyday sense, like they support you, or are there for you, or take care of you … but literally: in a life or death sense. Can both live? Or must one die? What happens if one of the half dies? Can the other half go on? How? And is it possible that we can live our lives so that the chances of meeting these ghostly other halfs … of encountering these doppelgangers, these essential missing pieces … becomes not just possible, but inevitable?