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Sunday, February 7, 2010

BD impressions: The Double Life of Veronique

3:59 PM / BD Impressions / 3 Comments

My first viewing of The Double Life of Veronique was a little on the disappointing side. Prior to watching it, I hadn't seen anything of Krzysztof Zieslowski's work outside of the "Three Colours" trilogy, which I found very impressive, particularly Blue. While that trilogy was very esoteric, all three entries were held together by something approaching a coherent story. Call me conventional, but I generally find that I need an actual story in order to get me hooked. It can be as lightweight as something like that of Dario Argento's Suspiria, essentially just an excuse to indulge in audio-visual excesses, but give me a beginning, a middle and an end. The Double Life of Veronique doesn't really have any of these. What it does have is incredible cinematography and a superb central performance by Irène Jacob, who appears in every single scene and upon whose shoulders the entire film rests.

And maybe that's enough. I can't say I responded at all to the themes of fate and destiny that seemed to be intertwined throughout the narrative (such as there is), but just about every single frame is a work of art and cinematographer Slawomir Idziak's use of gel lighting is every bit as striking here as his later work in Blue and Red (White being, perhaps unsurprisingly, the least visually striking of the trilogy). It's entirely possible to simply sit there and be mesmerised by what it looks like, but I must confess that, at the end of my first viewing, I felt a bit let down. I'm not sure what I'd been expecting, but it didn't provide me with the sense of closure I'd been hoping for (which, you can argue, is the whole point). The Sunday Times quotation on the back cover describes the film as "[r]ich in images, wistful, mysterious, unsettling, inexplicable and beguiling", and I'd have to agree with all of that, with a particular emphasis on the last two adjectives.

I responded more positively to the film on my second viewing, at least in part because I now knew what to expect. I still think it's a weaker film than any of the Three Colours trilogy, but I'm not sorry I watched it, and if it was worth seeing twice in the space of a week, then it must have been doing something right.

Image quality: A bit of a disappointment, this. Such a stunning-looking film undoubtedly deserved a flawless transfer, but what we end up getting is all a bit underwhelming. Right from the word go, it's clear that the image has been blasted with heavy noise reduction, rendering the grain static and unnatural and giving many shots a soft, rather smudgy quality. Some of the close-ups look decent, but a lot of the time I was reminded of a Universal catalogue title in terms of the overall texture of the image. The noise reduction is so heavy that, during fades to black, elements of the previous scene remain faintly ghosted on to the image. For instance, this is what you see following the Sideral logo at the very end of the stream. (If it isn't visible on your monitor, either crank up your brightness slightly or look at this equalised version.) 6/10

The Double Life of Veronique
studio: Artificial Eye; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 21.4 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 31.40 Mbit/sec

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