The Double Life of Veronique

Name: The Double Life of Veronique
Genre: Drama, Mystery, Fantasy, Romance, Music
Released: November 22, 1991
Duration: 98 min
Rating: 86
Cast: Irène Jacob, Wladyslaw Kowalski

1991

METASCORE

Universal acclaim based on 10 Critic Reviews

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USER SCORE

Generally favorable reviews based on 36 Ratings

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7.7

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7.7	User Score Generally favorable reviews based on 36 Ratings

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Movie Details & Credits

Miramax Films | Release Date: November 22, 1991 | R

Starring: Irène Jacob, Wladyslaw Kowalski

Summary: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is incandescent as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Though unknown to each other, the two women share anKrzysztof Kieślowski’s international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is incandescent as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Though unknown to each other, the two women share an enigmatic, emotional bond, which Kieślowski details in gorgeous reflections, colors, and movements. Aided by Slawomir Idziak’s shimmering cinematography and Zbigniew Preisner’s haunting, operatic score, Kieślowski creates one of cinema’s most purely metaphysical works. The Double Life of Véronique is an unforgettable symphony of feeling. [Criterion]… Expand

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Genre(s): Drama, Mystery, Fantasy, Romance, Music

Rating: R

Runtime: 98 min

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Critic Reviews

100

Staff [Not Credited]

The Double Life of Véronique makes the familiar seem extraordinary and memorably conjures up the sense of metaphysical forces guiding its characters’ everyday lives. Read full review

100

Anthony Lane

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. Read full review

100

Scott Tobias

The film wilts under the harsh light of rationality; after all, how could anyone make sense of a heroine whose doppelgänger is both distinctly separate and inextricably connected to her? And yet these parallel lives rhyme so tunefully through the reflective cinematography and sweeping score that any confusion or disbelief tends to melt away. Read full review

Roger Ebert

There is a long central section in the film which is a triumph of narrative technique. Read full review

Empire David Parkinson

Although not all the loose ends are tied up in the telling of this bizarre and absorbing tale of love, grief and goose-bumps, one scarcely minds at all, since the fourth-dimensional doings on offer, (underlined with a marvellously moody, haunting score by Zbigniew Preisner) are like an erotic trip into The Twilight Zone. Read full review

Marjorie Baumgarten

This movie achieves a rare grace: it tells a story that could only exist in the form of a movie (or, perhaps, as a piece of poetry). The story is told not so much in customary narrative structures, but in glimpses, hints, and intimations. It has a way of taking the solid and making it chimerical. Read full review

Vincent Canby

The Double Life of Veronique doesn't end. About three-quarters of the way through, it starts to dissolve, like mist, so that by the time it is actually over the screen seems to have been blank for some time. Read full review

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User Reviews

ahmedaiman1999

Jul 30, 2021

A few spoilery bits throughout!

Just like a constellation you're unable to decipher yet sure its stars are linked together to form a certain pattern, the lives of Weronika and Véronique are inextricably, and inexplicably, linked by an invisible thread only intuitively felt. The former livesA few spoilery bits throughout!

Just like a constellation you're unable to decipher yet sure its stars are linked together to form a certain pattern, the lives of Weronika and Véronique are inextricably, and inexplicably, linked by an invisible thread only intuitively felt. The former lives in Poland while the latter in France, they were born on the same day, share a knack for music (Weronika is a choir singer with an ethereal, angelic voice; Véronique is a music teacher), and suffer from a cardiological problem. They're, in a mythological sense of the word, doppelgängers, who'd better live in two parallel worlds lest bumping into each other would result in putting one another's lives into a tailspin. In one sense, the film is about that person in your dreams who you think, besides looking exactly like you, complements you in ways beyond your capacity even if you're sharing the same affinities as well. A splitting image you'd easily mistake for your other half even though you're pretty much a whole. Someone you long to meet to be fulfilled, and when awake, you grieve for the implausibility of it all. And I think it's within this realm where the movie operates on a subconscious level so that you're effortlessly connected emotionally with it by merely letting yourself immersed in its sepia-drenched images and its downpour to wash over you. However, I wouldn't buy that description at all. In another sense, it's a film about discovering one's own identity. Insofar this seems a proper description that I can't refute, I still think this is just scratching the surface; focusing on obvious details and disregarding the overarching theme. For me, The Double Life of Véronique is about grieving for your younger, juvenile self despite the naivety that led to its demise; about a deep-seated longing for the past that grows on while growing old even though you're more mature and successful now than you were way back when. And this is exactly where the film manages to hit some nostalgic notes, for the film seems to celebrate that desperate longing in one way or another. Besides the puppets show I'll mention later, there's a scene that sums up all this in a few words: Véronique's father shows her a fragrance to try it, she tells him it's nice but the one he showed her the other day was more pleasant. "This is from the end of Autumn, the other was from the beginning," is her father's reply, which he follows by wondering whether people would need this fragrance at all. The movie is chockablock with subtle visual and narrative details carry multi-layered symbolic significance that I couldn't get my head around in my first watch.

The Double Life of Véronique is an enigmatic metaphysical tale with an expressionistic set design and cinematography littered with subtleties functioning as an objective correlative, stressing every emotional beat along the way. There's a lot of reflections in The Double Life of Véronique and the look-alike characters see themselves, or rather sense each other, in many things: images; objects. Throughout the first half, we see recurring distortions, upside-down images and mirror-like reflections, some show convexity and others concavity. We see plenty of objects such as a tram window glass, a man's magnifying spectacles, and a starry marble. They're all suggestive of something wrong rippling Weronika's life and irking her of late while bringing her fears of not being "alone in this world" to the fore. Besides, there are many juxtapository images the editing mix in that accentuate the dual nature at the core of the film. Indeed It's a film where objects and images hold immense value to the characters but also work as clues of revealing significance, and expository tools to the viewer as well. It's not until the marionette show where I started to fathom the film through the "metamorphosis by death" metaphor. The shroud is a cocoon? No wonder why there's a shot from the point of view of a corpse! Through this scene, Kieślowski makes a parallel to Véronique's double life, indicating that with the death of Weronika, Véronique began a fully-fledged new life. Moreover, by letting the camera linger on Jacob’s face, Kieślowski captures the intensity of her internal conflict, and by ending the dizzying fits of Weronika with an off-kilter, tilted angle, we collapse with her. Thus, the camera is both a guiding force and a participant in Weronika's crumpling life and Veronique's quest of love and working out her existential issues. The Double Life of Véronique is just a flawless harmony or a poetic mood piece, buoyed by Idziak's ravishing cinematography, Preisner's haunting score, and sees Irène Jacob — in one of the most riveting performances I've ever seen to date — emoting endless feelings across the film's fleeting runtime, taking you on a rollercoaster of emotions from start to finish.… Expand

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kayhamed

Nov 6, 2018

This should have been a short film. It was too long for 98 minutes and had many extra lengthy sequences that I can't remember how many times I fast forward! I don't recommend it 'cause not only it's boring, it doesn't have any special purpose.

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