The Double Life of Veronique (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique is a mesmerizing and poetic film experience which expresses such transcendent feelings as intuition, identity, fate and free-will. Weronika, a young Polish woman, is by chance after singing impromptu at a friend’s rehearsal offered an audition and ultimately a solo part in a concert. Suffering from heart problems, she suddenly collapses and dies in mid-recital, shortly after seeing her doppelgänger in a Kraków square. That double is the French music teacher Véronique; who also suffers from a weak heart. Immediately after the death of Weronika, of whose existence she has no inkling, Véronique experiences an uncanny sense of grief and solitude and consequently quits her other career as a singer. She beings receiving a number of mysterious packages and by playing detective, Véronique traces the clues to Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare where she finds a puppeteer waiting for her, and the two eventually become lovers. 

Are we alone in this universe, or is there more than one of us? We have no rational understanding of this, it is simply a feeling that we have, perhaps physical or metaphysical, as such feelings are inexplicable and beyond our comprehension. The legendary Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski also suffered from a heart condition, had a heart attack in 1995, and shortly died in 1996 in a Warsaw hospital after botched heart surgery; creating an unsettling connection to the director and both heroines of the story. With just a short span of films, Kieslowski has created some of the most spiritual and life affirming films in the world, often dealing with such existential and transcending themes as illness, death, loss and morality. Kieslowski defined the film's subject matter of the The Double Life of Veronique by stating, "The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film." The Double Life of Veronique doesn't just allow audiences for uncertainty and analysis, but encourages it, creating a mysterious, and spiritual world of coincidences, parallels, and synchronicity, linking our souls to the past, present and future.