THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE: THE FORCED CHOICE OF FREEDOM

The only authentic decision is to abandon love and give priority to a Cause—if this turns out to be too much for me, I kill myself

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In the last decade, I have focused my work on quantum paradoxes, especially on the superposition of realities. I was not original in this: a new life experience is in the air lately, a perception that explodes the form of the linear narrative and renders life as a multiform flow. Up to the domain of the “hard” sciences (quantum physics and its multiple‑reality interpretation, neo‑Darwinism), we seem to be haunted by the chanciness of life and the alternate versions of reality. To quote Stephen Jay Gould’s blunt formulation, which uses precisely the cinema metaphor: “Wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different.” Either life is experienced as a series of multiple parallel destinies that interact and are crucially affected by meaningless contingent encounters, the points at which one series intersects with and intervenes in another (see Robert Altman’s Short Cuts), or different outcomes of the same plot are repeatedly enacted (the “parallel universes” or “alternative possible worlds” scenarios). Even many “serious” historians have recently published on “virtual histories,” interpreting crucial modern‑age events, from Cromwell’s victory over the Stuarts and the American War of Independence to the disintegration of Communism, as hinging on unpredictable and sometimes even improbable chances. This perception of our reality as one of the possible—often not even the most probable—outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply canceled out but continue to haunt our reality as a specter of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant linear narrative forms of our literature and cinema.

Krzysztof Kieślowski is the filmmaker of such superposed realities, so in this text I have decided to publish again—with some changes and additions—an old text of mine on Kieślowski. His obsession with the role of chance and of parallel alternate histories can be perceived as an endeavor to articulate this new life experience in all its ambiguity, one that links him to the more clearly “postmodern” directors. (Consider the fact that it was Tom Tykwer who filmed Heaven, the scenario finished by Kieślowski just before his death. Is Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run not a cyber‑inflected remake of Kieślowski’s Blind Chance?) The lesson of this motif of chance and alternate histories seems to be that we live in a world in which, as in a cyberspace game, when one choice leads to a catastrophic ending, we can return to the starting point and make another, better choice—what was the first time a suicidal mistake can the second time be done in a correct way, so that the opportunity is not missed. The ultimate case is The Double Life of Véronique (1991). Here is a short description of the plot:

In 1968, a Polish girl looks at the winter stars, while in France another girl sees the first leaf of spring. In 1990, Weronika, a young Polish woman, sings in an outdoor concert with her choir when a rainstorm interrupts the performance. That night, she has sex with her boyfriend, Antek, and leaves the next day for Kraków to visit her sick aunt. She tells her father that she has a strange feeling of not being alone. In Kraków, Weronika joins a local choir and auditions for a solo part. She is selected, and the opportunity makes her happy. While walking through the Main Square, she notices a French tourist who looks identical to her, taking photographs before boarding a bus. During the concert where she is to sing the solo, Weronika collapses onstage and dies from cardiac arrest.

That same day in Clermont‑Ferrand, France, Véronique feels sudden sadness after having sex with her boyfriend. She later tells her music teacher that she is quitting the choir. At school, she attends a marionette performance with her students and leads them in a musical piece by the 18th‑century composer Van den Budenmayer, the same music Weronika sang before her death. That night, Véronique sees a puppeteer at a traffic light signaling to her not to light the wrong end of her cigarette. Later, she receives a phone call with no voice, only choir music. She visits her father the next day and tells him that she feels she has lost someone, though she does not know who. Soon, Véronique receives a package containing a shoelace. She later identifies the puppeteer as Alexandre Fabbri, a children’s book author. She reads several of his books before receiving another package from her father, which contains a cassette tape. The tape includes various sounds: a typewriter, a train station, footsteps, and a fragment of Van den Budenmayer’s music. The envelope’s postage stamp leads her to Gare Saint‑Lazare in Paris. At a café in the station, Véronique finds Alexandre, who tells her that he sent the packages as an experiment to see if she would come. She is upset and leaves to check into a nearby hotel. Alexandre follows her and apologizes. They later have sex.

The next morning, Véronique tells Alexandre that she has always felt like she was in two places at once and that something has been influencing her life. She shows him photos from her recent trip to Poland. Alexandre notices one that looks like her, but she tells him it is not. When she sees the image, she realizes it is Weronika. She becomes emotional, and Alexandre comforts her. She understands that Weronika’s death has influenced her decision to stop singing. Later, Véronique visits Alexandre and sees him working on two marionettes that resemble her. He explains that he needs a second puppet as a backup in case one is damaged. He demonstrates how to operate the marionette while the duplicate remains on the table. Alexandre reads from his new book, which is about two women born on the same day in different places who share a mysterious connection. Later, Véronique goes to her father’s house. She stops at the gate and touches an old tree trunk. Inside the house, her father seems to sense her presence.¹

In short, Véronique learns from Weronika, avoids the suicidal choice of singing, and survives. Similarly, in Red (1994), Auguste avoids the mistake of the judge; even White (1993) ends with the prospect of Karol and his French bride getting a second chance and remarrying. The very title of Annette Insdorf’s book on Kieślowski, Double Lives, Second Chances, points in this direction: the other life is here to give us a second chance, so that repetition becomes accumulation, with a prior mistake as a base for successful action. However, while it sustains the prospect of repeating past choices and thus retrieving the missed opportunities, this universe can also be interpreted in the opposite, much darker way. There is a material feature of Kieślowski’s films that supports this: his use of filters. As described in the director’s own words in the book Kieślowski on Kieślowski, regarding A Short Film About Killing (1987):

“The city and its surroundings are shown in a specific way. The lighting cameraman . . . used filters, which he’d made specially. Green filters so that the color in the film is specifically greenish. Green is supposed to be the color of spring, the color of hope, but if you put a green filter on the camera, the world becomes much crueler, duller, and emptier.”