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USA/Australia: Clint Eastwood, 2003

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USA: Michael Moore, 2007

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USA: John Lasseter, 1998

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Original title: La double vie de Véronique
France/Poland/Norway: Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991

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 her as it was 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.

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Original title: La double vie de Véronique
France/Poland/Norway: Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991

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USA: Bryan Bertino, 2008

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