Veronique is an ethereal rumination on the profundities of sensuous experience, fate, and human interconnectedness. My two favorite shots come relatively early in the film. In the first of them, one of the two central characters sings in a choir as it begins to rain. The other singers appear to scurry to shelter in the background, but the singer in the foreground continues to sing, sublimely, before looking up and smiling almost ecstatically. The shot is framed tightly around her, such that the rain almost appears to come from nowhere—what’s important is her immediate experience of it. There is an overwhelming glory in this moment, a transcendent embrace of its existence-as-moment, of the pure, immediate and sensuous experience of it. The second of my two favorite shots is a view of buildings through a window. A distortion in the image, caused by the glass, moves across the frame, stretching and smearing bits of stone and grass is in its passage. It is almost as if the film is revealing something mystical, something beyond our grasp, hidden within or between the quanta of our experience.
In some sense, the whole film is like these shots: a miasma of sensuous experience, built from stunning interplays of light and dark, colors and sounds. In several scenes, the immediacy of these experiences as experiences is brought home by first-person-perspective shots. But the beauty of the movie comes not only from the beauty of its images and sounds, or the moments in our own lives that they evoke—those rare moments when we were suddenly clearly aware of the sublimity in living and breathing and feeling—but from its central narrative conceit of the double. The two central characters are identical in almost every way. Both are singers and both are of ill health. One dies while singing, and the other immediately afterward gives it up. In these two characters, the film seems to suggest a metaphysics of sensuousness: it is as if there is an underlying quintessence, a great sea of joy and hurt and sounds and sights, and we all take part in it, almost as though our individual identities are simply ripples or agglomerations of this medium of raw experience.
At one point, a puppeteer puts on a show in which a dancer dies and is reborn as a butterfly, and we immediately think of this story’s relationship with the two central characters: the one dies, the other lives by avoiding the path of the first, almost as if the experience of the one transmigrates to the other. Later, the puppeteer manipulates the surviving woman. With obscure cues, he draws her into loving him. She loves him nonsensically, with abandon. The question of human freedom is raised: if two people can be one, or one person two, if all is sense and mystery, then the notion of freedom is absurd. We are all parts of the vast sea, and the motions of this sea are ineffable. But our existence is a partaking of the whole, and on occasion we catch a glimpse of that whole and feel that it is sublime.
Tags: Buddhism, favorites, movies, perception, phenomenology, the double
