Have you ever felt that your life, while real in the most personal sense, could also exist simultaneously elsewhere, even if lived by some other person? Just what might that entail? In my youth, I’d often imagine living in France—perhaps I’d have moved there after living as an exchange student, but then, I’d remember the emotion that brings me back to the familiar. And while it is easy to romanticize, one must remember that wherever this imaged place and person resides, that the same problems will exist there—perhaps not in degree, but in kind.
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique is indeed a film of feeling. In fact, this is how Roger Ebert opens his review: ‘Here is a film about a feeling. Like all feelings, it is one that can hardly be described in words, although it can be evoked in art. It is the feeling that we are not alone, because there is more than one of us. We are connected at a level far, far beneath thought. We have no understanding of this. It is simply a feeling that we have.’ He chooses the word feeling, and while I don’t disagree, my instinct wants to instead reach for the word intuition, which is somewhat similar, but evokes more of the body—taste, touch, sensation. Within this film, that which goes on is rarely stated, but implied. […]
