The Double Life Of Veronique

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‘The Double Life of Veronique’ (NR) By Hal Hinson Washington Post Staff Writer December 13, 1991 Krzysztof Kieslowski's "The Double Life of Veronique" has a fragile, opiated atmosphere that hovers somewhere between eroticism and melancholy. It's a hushed, moody puzzle of a film with the haunted, unresolved air of a ghost story by Henry James, or one of Borges' poetic labyrinths. You feel as if you're only half-seeing it, as you might see the image of solar eclipse in smoked glass, or as if your sense of time had been disrupted and the whole thing had flashed before your eyes in the instant between heartbeats. Only the sensual presence of the movie's heroine, played by the smashingly expressive young French actress Irene Jacob, gives us a foothold on this slippery ice. When we first see her, she is a Polish music student named Veronika, and immediately we're struck by the expression of passionate rapture in her eyes. Singing with her high school choir, she has the quality of ecstatic transport that one sees in the painted images of saints. She seems otherworldly, an earthbound angel, with her gaze fixed on some far-off heavenly light. Veronika's spirit of distracted, inner absorption has a distinct but ineffable source. Waking from a dream, she tells her father she feels as if she is not alone. "Of course, you're not alone," he says in response, causing her to look down at the floor. "I don't know," she says. Then one day while visiting her aunt in Krakow, she crosses a town square crowded with student protesters and, looking for a way out of the mob, sees a young woman among a group of foreigners boarding a tour bus -- a young woman with dark hair and greenish brown eyes just like hers, wearing a dark wool suit and a red scarf just like hers. The other young woman is too busy taking photographs for her eyes to met Veronika's, but without knowing it, just

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