04 · 24 · 25

Irene Jacob. THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE: Morelia 2023

Rafael Aviña

In October 2023, renowned film and theater actress Irène Jacob was not only part of the jury for Mexican Feature Film at the 21st edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), but also presented the film The Double Life of Véronique by Krzysztof Kieslowski, for which she won the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991. Of enormous charisma and simplicity as could be seen during her time at the festival, Irène Jacob debuted in Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants in 1987 and since then has worked in more than 80 films for cinema and television under the orders of directors such as Antonioni, Wenders, Angelopoulos, Agnieszka Holland, Oliver Parker and more; also, in September 2021 she was elected to preside over the Institut Lumière upon the death of filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier.

After Dekalog (1989), problems with censorship in his native Poland became more acute and Kieslowski would film The Double Life of Véronique in co-production with France, the country that would open its doors to him. Here, the Weronika of Krakow and Warsaw shares with the Véronique of Clemont Ferrand and Paris a taste for music: the former is the striking first voice of a choir, the latter a music teacher. Both are motherless, suffer from a heart condition and constantly resort to the same lip balm. Armed with two complementary episodes, one filmed in Warsaw and the other in Paris with Iréne Jacob herself, Kieslowski, farther from Edgar Allan Poe and closer to Jorge Luis Borges, explores the possibility of repeated lives, of the chance coincidences that unite two identical women in two opposing nations. Before the precise and grandiloquent traits of the tragic heroine embodied by the Polish Weronika, her French double appears as a fragmented and languid personality that is redeemed by life, thanks to the tragedy of the Weronika, in a sublime work of unfoldings, more poetic than intimate.

Beyond the limits of the fantastic or the delirious metaphysical-supernatural pursuit represented in films like The Other (1972, dir. Robert Mulligan) and above all in William Wilson (1968, dir. Louis Malle, in his episode of Spirits of the Dead), although, without leaving aside the disturbing touch of mystery, the Polish filmmaker achieves here a disturbing reflection on the theme of the double, according to a risky and complex proposal that went beyond his closed, pessimistic and claustrophobic universe of the filmic Dekalog (remember: Thou shalt not murder and A Short Film about Love).

In The Double Life of Véronique, the recognition of the existence of that identical other in a Polish square, the one who watches and the one who captures with a camera, does not only refer to the issue of the double, but to the way of implying two opposite worlds and realities from an analysis of the human condition and the sensitive interpretation of the beautiful Iréne Jacob, in that profound recreation of two parallel lives in which weeping, joy and a sexuality assumed with absolute freedom are mixed.

A marble that serves the protagonist(s) to observe the world upside down (the upside down of her own? ), a puppeteer, a leash, a cassette recorded in a train station, a photograph in which she discovers her double and more serve to create a disturbing, even unreal atmosphere in dramatically real worlds as represented by Krakow, whose young demonstrators flee through the streets pursued by the police, while French tourists capture that moment with a certain morbid curiosity and military jeeps carry statues of Lenin to an unknown destination, or a cosmopolitan Paris where Poles and French intertwine in an enigmatic way.

During the screening in Morelia, Iréne Jacob commented that this was a film about intuition and presentiments and that Kieslowski would make three alternative endings for worldwide audiences. In addition to the Best Actress award at Cannes and the FIPRESCI Award and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury for Krzysztof Kieslowski at the same event, The Double Life of Véronique was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and the French César for Best Actress, as well as its powerful soundtrack by Zbigniew Preisner.

Translated by Adrik Díaz