(1991; La double vie de Véronique, French, Polish, Italian) Enigmatic enchantment (music as a cosmic vibration) connects two young women, unknown to each other, Weronika, a Polish singer, and Véronique, a French music teacher, both residing with their fathers (their mothers deceased), both roles played by the arrestingly beautiful Irene Jacob.

In late autumn Weronika, after singing in the rain, makes love to her boyfriend Antek. She wakes from a dream and tells her father: "I have a strange feeling … like I'm not alone in the world." Taking the train to Krakow, she goes to visit with her ailing aunt.

After getting knocked down during a street protest, she notices a girl on a bus, taking pictures with a camera, who looks just like herself. Though she has had no prior professional experience at vocal performance, she wins an audition competition. Just before this, after feeling a sharp pain in her left side, an old man flashes her on the sidewalk. During the concert, she collapses dead on the stage.

With a hauntingly ethereal operatic score by Zbigniew Preisner, director Krzysztof Kieslowski, who co-wrote the original screenplay with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, employs optical effects with reflections, shooting some scenes through differing glass surfaces.

While making love with her boyfriend, a welling up of grief suddenly overcomes Véronique. She quits taking piano lessons (to the great disappointment of her elderly teacher) and teaches music in a school.

Upon first acquaintance with a visiting puppeteer, Alexandre Fabbri (Philippe Volter), whose name she will not learn until later, she feels immediate attraction; he puts on a marionette show for the children of a dancer who falls, breaking her leg, later to rise out of a chrysalis as a butterfly. Late at night she answers the phone, hearing only breathing then music. In the morning she informs her papa: "I'm in love."

Catherine, for whom she's volunteered to do a favor, provides Alexandre's name and that he's the author as well of a children's story on which he's based his marionette program. In the mail she receives an envelope with a shoestring, which she matches with a cardiogram; next a package arrives in which she knows there's an empty box of Virginia cigars. Finally an audiotape of noises reaches her by post.

Using clues from the sounds and postmark, she makes a trip into Paris (one of the Polish audition judges happens to notice her) where she finds Alexandre, who's been waiting for her for two days: "I was afraid you wouldn't come…. whether it was psychologically possible." When he begins to explain it was a quest for writing another book to see if a woman would respond to a stranger making a phone call, she asks, "Why me?" before getting upset and running away. He pursues her.

At a hotel she asks for a room (287, the same as Antek's at the Holiday Inn in Krakow) before encountering Alexandre again. In the room, wanting to know everything about her, he looks at the contents of her purse she's emptied onto the bed, picking up a glass ball: "Now I know why you're the one." She says she's known all along.

On a sheet of photos she had taken during a trip through Krakow, he points out a picture of herself, except that it's not, something she'd not noticed before. The conclusion to the US release is a little different and a few shots longer from the European version, both involving Véronique's father in his shop using an electric saw to cut through a piece of wood as she hears the music, sitting outside in her car, and touches the bark of a tree.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

Patrick Ivers can be reached via e-mail at .