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| The New Yorker SOUL MATES Do movies grow old? They may physically fade, as the film stock decays; they may look dated, as the trappings, or the actorly mannerisms, of a former age become more glaring; but what of the feelings that they generate, or the gestures that they sought to enshrine? These questions crowded in as I watched “The Double Life of Véronique,” a film that held me in a discomforting trance when I saw it, and resaw it, on its first appearance, in 1991. Now it is back, as part of the Krzysztof Kieslowski season at Lincoln Center, running from April 5th through April 23rd. The retrospective includes early shorts and rare documentaries, and all Kieslowski fans will have their touchstones; some will bow before his noble “Three Colors” trilogy, completed two years before his death, in 1996, while purists will insist on the supremacy of the “Decalogue,” a series of films rooted in the Ten Commandments. Novices, however, might care to begin with mid-career puzzlers such as “No End” or “Blind Chance,” or, better still, to dive into “Véronique.” The film stars Irène Jacob, first as Veronika, a student in Kraków, and then as Véronique, a music teacher in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand. The women are unrelated and unknown to one another, but they are identical, and, at one miraculous instant, they are separated by a matter of yards. In short, they are soul mates. You can only hope to film such a subject if you believe in the existence of the soul, but Kieslowski goes one better: he acts as the flight controller of the soul. Poor, enraptured Veronika, singing onstage with an orchestra, expires in the middle of a phrase—literally dying for her art—and the camera passes serenely over the heads of the audience, charting her departure from this life. We even get a shot from within her grave, watching and hearing the earth being tossed down by mourners; it is a fright worthy of Poe, although he might have fainted at what follows—a straight cut to the living Véronique, nearing orgasm in the arms of a lover. The great death has led to a little one, and from here on she will be haunted (though more consoled than spooked) by her other half. Fans of the director praise his metaphysical powers, but that claim, in any filmmaker, is to be approached with caution. The sole reason that Kieslowski, 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 Véronique’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 Véronique’s room, you might reasonably wonder if Kieslowski 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. 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 Véronique 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? Then, there is Irène Jacob. Time has not weakened my worship, but I did start to question, this time round, how skilled an actress she actually was. The picture is unthinkable without her presence—swaying between the jubilant and the fretful, all wide eyes and corrugated brow. It is as if she lacked a layer of skin, and that rawness verges on the embarrassing; she comes across not as a decided character but as somebody to whom things happen—a perfect alabaster form, still taking blows from the sculptor’s chisel. When Véronique sits with her young pupils, watching a puppet show, she responds with the same ecstatic naïveté as they do. She is frequently naked, but her face, in arousal, could be that of a saint, lost in religious contemplation, and her bare breast is also the clothed breast that she instinctively cups, mid-song, as if striving to hold her heart in. Kieslowski was brilliant with children and with the elderly, who, lacking the strength for defiance, tend to submit to the imprint of fate; could decades of totalitarian rule have attuned him almost too well to the spectacle of human beings being jerked around by the puppeteers of the state? Where are the robust resisters of middle age? Near the start of the film, Veronika turns to her father with a plea: “What do I really want, Papa?” To Western ears, especially those of American youth, that will sound comically passive, yet we live with such a plethora of wants, with such high expectations that they will be met, and with such a barrage of complaints if they are not, that to find a director filing reports from a world of uncertainty has a strangely tonic effect. The two leads in “The Double Life of Véronique” may annoy us, but whatever it is they suffer from—loneliness, diminished civil rights, an impoverishment of the will—has forced them to clutch at those scraps of bliss which life can unexpectedly let fall. If you wish to prime yourself for two and a half weeks at Lincoln Center, try consulting Kieslowski’s fellow-Poles: not just film-makers but poets, too, so many of them expert in that wry delight. All of Veronika, and Véronique, is prefigured in these lines of Czeslaw Milosz: O my love, where are they,
where are they going VILLAGE VOICE Self-conscious aesthete, existential structuralist, one of the world's most eloquent conjoiners of metaphysical mystery and sociopolitical critique, and a still-missed fallen soldier in the shrinking ranks of Euro-art-film, Krzysztof Kieslowski was only a well-known global figure for about six years before he died—from the film-fest siege of The Decalogue beginning in 1989 to the climax of his overrated Three Colors trilogy, Red (1994). But he was a busy cineaste from the mid '60s on, and, eventually, an integral inheritor of not only Antonioni-Tarkovsky monumentalism but the mantle of being Poland's cinematic conscience in the autumn years of Andrzej Wajda. The Decalogue may well end up being KK's single enduring work, if for its conceptual bravado as much as for its cumulative torque and weighty ethical interrogations. But while fans of it, the rather magical The Double Life of Veronique (1991), and Three Colors might be curious about Kieslowski's apprentice-years short films (all of which are crystalline and powerful, from 1966's The Office to 1980's Railway Station), they should seek out his grittier, Soviet-bloc-era one-off features as well, which generally ask meatier, more immediate questions. (1980's The Calm spent five years on the censor's shelf.) Camera Buff (1979) is the tragicomic morality tale about a complacent Communist whose 8mm habit begins to control and destroy the very life he seeks to capture "as it is," while Blind Chance (1981), Kieslowski's first game of ambiguous narrative crisscross and his only state- censored film, has Boguslaw Linda live out three differing futures depending on whether or not he catches a train to Warsaw. No End (1985) is a kind of study for Blue that has grieving widow Grazyna Szapolowska seek solace in the family of an imprisoned labor dissident, but better, and more pragmatic, is Kieslowski's first theatrical feature, The Scar (1976), a portrait of a factory project, the village it seeks to develop but instead decimates, and the project's appointed builder-director (Franciszek Pieczka), a modest humanist poisoned by the job from the inside out.
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