The Cinematheque

“Cerebral as well as sensual, and using the stylistic devices characteristic of a Resnais … The film’s teasing paradoxes make for a complexity that is considerably more than double.”

Jonathan Romney, Sight and Sound

Irène Jacob won Best Actress honours at Cannes for her dual role in The Double Life of Véronique, the haunting, seductive, metaphysical fable that was Polish master Krzysztof Kieślowski’s feature follow-up to Dekalog. In a variation on the forking-path premise of Blind Chance, the film imagines two homonymous women, physically identical, leading parallel lives in Poland and France. Each has pursued a vocation in music, is ignited by passions of the heart, and feels as though, in some inexplicable way, they’ve never truly been alone. Unaware of the other’s existence, a sudden tragedy for Weronika in Krakow is registered by Véronique in Clermont-Ferrand, altering the course (or delivering on the fate) of their mysteriously tethered lives. Kieślowski’s miraculous film, featuring truly ethereal camerawork by Sławomir Idziak and a bold, binaristic green-and-red colour scheme, is among the director’s most luminous achievements, a work attuned to the magic of the unknowable.

In Polish and French with English subtitles

The opening-night screening on December 3 will include series remarks by Artistic Director Shaun Inouye.

“Psychic, euphoric … Few but Kieslowski could execute such a film; though it welcomes analysis, it spigots ethereal sensuality and a universal human understanding.”

Samantha Vacca, Brooklyn Magazine

“A poetic overture on the power of senses and sensibilities … Kieślowski doesn’t want to create anything resembling an answer to these magnetic questions about fate and chance. He simply wants us to experience them in all their sensual glory, and be open to the fact that our world can turn wonderfully upside down at any moment.”

Glenn Heath Jr., Slant Magazine