Truly Dreadful Film

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

An absolute waste of money

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Released in 1991, "The double life of Véronique" helped Irène Jacob to forge her career as she won the Cannes Festival Best Actress Award thanks to her double role as Weronika and Véronique. The strength of the film lies in this omnipresent connection between the two women that look alike, feel each other's emotions and yet they have never met. Krzysztof Kieślowski, that tragically passed away five years later, created this masterpiece that marked his career : a wise mix of poetry, whose plot oscillates between dream and reality. The silences, the palpable emotions, the almost-buried memories, the constant distress feed this synergy between the two women. The whole movie excels thanks to the puppets' play, a real metaphor of the connection between the women. The yellowish photography, sometimes flirting with a well-polished sepia, enhances the emotions and the actor's glances. "The double life of Véronique" is visually meticulous, sensitive and whose originality has lost none of its superbness since its released. Full review on our blog Los Indiscretos : https://losindiscretos.org

Weronika and Véronique are two unrelated connected lives. Weronika (Irène Jacob) is a singer in small town Poland. She gets an audition for a choir. Then she sees french tourist Véronique (Irène Jacob) taking pictures. Weronika collapses and dies in her first performance. Véronique feels the lost and quits singing.There is a pervasive saddest throughout the movie. The film is drained of bright colors. Weronika's life is the first 30 minutes and the rest is Véronique dealing with a lost that she can't fully comprehend. Irène Jacob is a beauty. She has a great dreamlike quality. However the two characters don't have enough separations. It's a fine art-house film of sadness.

Two parallel stories about two identical women; one living in Poland, the other in France. They do not know each other, but their lives are nevertheless profoundly connected.Polish cinema is not well-known. France and Italy seem to have the European continent locked when it comes to great films. For Poland, you have Roman Polanski, and he has spent much (probably most) of his career outside the country. But this film is one example of the great things that can come out of Poland.The very concept is interesting. Two people who are very much alike, whose lives influence each other, but live in completely separate places and do not know each other. Is it possible? Probably not. But a great premise, just the same.

Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Véronique is one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen. It hypnotizes in the first five minutes and doesn't let your attention go until the end. Not one minute is wasted, not one shot feels wrong. Every tiny detail about this movie feels just so perfect.This is essentially a story about metaphysical, almost supernatural traits and connections we share with people we may not even know. Weronika and Véronique (both brilliantly played by Irène Jacob) were born on the same day but in two different countries. Weronika is a bit more spiritual and impulsive, while Véronique is more down to earth. After W dies on her first musical performance, V (who's a music teacher) feels a turn in her mind and decides not to become a singer. This correlation is later brought up by a puppeteer V meets, who by extreme coincidence wants to write a book about two connected women who don't know each other, one who burned her hand on the stove as a kid and the other who reached for the stove but felt like not touching it.According to Kieslowski's interview, the movie is about how your actions affect other people's lives in the most abstract of ways. Of course, there's more to it, but that's the basic principle, and the movie takes the idea to the extreme, depicting W's life almost as a trial run for V's life. The theme of doubles is constantly repeated throughout the film, in the most obvious ways such as showing V or W's image reflected on mirrors, or linking it with the dolls the puppeteer makes, not just in the scene where he makes two puppets based on V (one of which he holds in his hand, the other of which he leaves laying on the table), but also through his marionette performance, which tells the story of a ballet dancer who breaks her leg and turns into an angel.The final scene of the film shows V arriving at her father's house and stopping at the gate, while her father is cutting some wood in his house. She touches the tree in front of the house, which makes him stop sawing and instead looks back. This scene, given that the bit of wood he's sawing came from the tree in his yard, once again implies the mysterious connection that we may share with other people, or, in this case, with natural elements in general. The puppet-related imagery, on the other hand, raises questions whether or not destiny is real, and if it is, how much freedom does it grant us?The cinematography by Slawomir Idziak is beautiful and makes this one of the most well-shot films I've ever seen (does anyone else think this movie's visual style, or at least parts of the plot line inspired Amélie?). The two domineering colors are green and red, which not only ties in with the Christmas theme the start of the film has going for it, but also matches V's and W's lives. Green and red are complementary colors, much as how V's life is complementary to W's.