THE MOVIE
Two women are born, one in Poland, the other in France, on the same day in 1968. They share the same name, the same interests in music and look identical, but they live in different worlds and don't know of the other's existence. Actress Irene Jacob plays the dual roles of Veronika and Veronique and was awarded the Best Actress prize at Cannes in the first major role of her career.

Both Veronika and Veronique have an intuitive knowledge of the other's presence. The Polish Veronika feels irrationally that she is not alone in the world. The French Veronique feels as if she is in two places at once. Perhaps most uncanny and intensely interesting, Veronique has the ability to learn from Veronika's experiences. When one girl burns her hand on a stove, the other instinctively knows to pull away from the flame.

At the beginning of the film, while visiting her aunt in Krakow, Veronika crosses a town square crowded with student protesters and she begins taking pictures of the event. A tour bus passes by, and unknown to her until much later, Veronika takes a picture of Veronique on the bus, a young woman with dark hair and greenish brown eyes just like hers, wearing a dark suit and a red scarf just like hers.

Veronika wins a music competition and is scheduled to make her debut as a singer performing with the local symphony. Before her appearance, though, she suffers from crippling chest pains and later, while onstage, dies of a heart condition. Not knowing anything about the incident and in a different country, Veronique enters a period of intense mourning that she cannot describe. She decides to break up with her boyfriend and give up her singing career.

She begins to receive anonymous late-night phone calls and strange presents, among them a cassette tape containing a progression of aural clues that lead her on a search for the sender. She expects that it is an admirer of sorts, but as she uncovers the mystery she begins to feel that someone else is guiding her, and the traces of the spirit of Veronika begin to enter and enrich the uneasy reality of the film in beautiful, haunting visual ways. The clues and gifts lead her to both the man who is sending them and to the knowledge of Veronika’s former existence. The man is an author and marionette artist named Alexandre Fabbri, played by Philippe Volter, who she saw perform at her school. He becomes a part of the journey and realizes with her, in a scene that is emotionally devastating and beautifully portrayed by Jacob, that she has lived an interconnected life with Veronika.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
The technical presentation of The Double Life of Veronique is wonderful. While this might be the expected norm in the world of Hollywood blockbusters, this is the first time both fans of the film and those just discovering it can see the film in such wonderful condition since its initial limited theatrical run. The DVD release of the movie has been much delayed. While Kieslowski’s other works such as the Decalogue and the Three Colors Trilogy have been widely available on DVD for some time, The Double Life of Veronique fell between the cracks, and was only available of VHS, most predominantly in a cropped 1:33 format. The DVD restores the film to its original 1.66:1 aspect ratio and restores the images to their original quality, doing justice to Slawomir Idziak’s nuanced cinematography. Thousands of instances of dirt and debris were removed and the film was transferred at 2K resolution and color corrected digitally to match its original optical timing. The DVD-9 was burned at the highest possible resolution that our standard def DVD players will allow. The audio is absolutely excellent. It is in Dolby Digital 5.1 Stereo and was mastered in 24 bits from the original magnetic tracks and cleaned up with restoration tools for precise clarity.

PACKAGING AND LAYOUT
As with most Criterion Collection DVDs, the packaging and layout for The Double Life of Veronique are a work of art in themselves. A special multi-folding box for the two-disc set depicts Irene Jacob’s sleeping face, broken into two equal parts by the fold, suggesting the split lives of her characters. The images, fonts and box cardboard are delicately chosen. There is nothing here that Criterion didn’t artfully select for the DVD release.

The DVD comes with a separate 55 page booklet featuring essays by Jonathan Romney, Slavoj Zizek, Peter Cowie, and selections from Kieslowski on Kieslowski. The booklet is filled with color stills and great insights about the production and how Veronique fits into the larger body of director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s work. The booklet definitely isn’t DVD extras swag, reading much more like the BFI Film Classics series of pocket books that is standard in film schools around the country.

SPECIAL FEATURES
The double disc set for The Double Life of Veronique is loaded with extras that could have been packaged and sold as a separate DVD. Like the Criterion Collection’s treatment of Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, which came with a DVD set that included a number of rare shorts Polanski made while in film school, the Veronique DVD takes on the proportions of a full fledged biopic on the director. It includes three short documentaries by Kieslowski and in an unusually comprehensive move, a short film by Kieslowski’s teacher Kazimierz Karavasz, among many other features. Here is a list:

DISC ONE
- Audio Commentary by Annette Insdorf, author of Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski – It would have been nice to have a few more commentaries, especially by those remaining who worked on the film as lead actors or key crew, but Insdorf is definitely comprehensive in her discussions about Kieslowski’s film and its role in the body of his greater work.

- Three Short Documentary Films by Kieslowski: Factory (1970), Hospital (1976), and Railway Station (1980) - For anyone interested in Krzysztof Kieslowski as a director, these are great films to view as an addendum to his features. They help better inform the way that he constantly sat somewhere between the bourgeoisie and the spiritual in tone and content.

- The Musicians (1958), A Short Film by Kieslowski’s teacher Kazimierz Karavasz - I won’t go into detail about this film, but it’s worth a viewing, especially to get a feel for the guy behind the guy.

- The U.S. Ending – A stateside ending to the feature and indirectly fascinating comparison of our audience’s cultural expectations.

- New and Improved English Subtitle Translation – Not to be underestimated. The original VHS version of the film had subtitles that felt partial. These are much more specific to the actual dialogue.

DISC TWO:
- Kieslowski – Dialogue (1991)

- A Documentary Featuring a Candid Interview with Kieslowski and rare Behind-the-Scenes Footage from the Set of The Double Life of Veronique

- 1966-1988: Kieslowski, Polish Filmmaker, a 2005 Documentary Tracing the Filmmaker’s Work in Poland, From his Days as a Student through The Double Life of Veronique

- New Video Interviews with Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak and Composer Zbigniew Preisner

- A 2005 Interview with Actress Irene Jacob

FINAL SHOTS
Those who like Kieslowski are attracted to his subtly uncanny ruminations on life and human connections as they pertain to the spirit. Those who don’t like Kieslowski often suggest that his work is more a totem of bourgeoisie ennui than true spiritualism. The Double Life of Veronique seems to avoid the critical pitfalls of his later work by presenting a tone and mood that are undeniably haunting and that compellingly inform the world he creates, leaving us with the idea that our own world is far more mysterious and wondrous than we had imagined.

DVD Film Score: A
DVD Audio/Video Score: A-
DVD Packaging and Layout Score: A+
DVD Special Features Score: A-
Overall Score: A