MOVIE REVIEW : Stylish but Hollow Gloss in ‘Veronique’

Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski is one of the most accomplished and daring of modern directors but, because of legal problems, his masterpiece, the 10-hour “Decalogue,” has only been exhibited in this country at film festivals. His new film, “The Double Life of Veronique” (selected theaters), may be his ticket to notoriety in the United States but, if so, it will be something of a hollow victory.

That’s because the movie itself is something of a hollow victory--a metaphysical conundrum with high-gloss visuals that might have wafted in from the same ad agency as those Calvin Klein Obsession commercials. You can even name the perfume here: Call it Duality.

Veronika, who lives in a small Polish village, and Veronique, who lives in France, look identical, were born on the same day 25 years ago, have beautiful singing voices, and heart conditions. (Both roles are played by Irene Jacob.) Without being aware of each other’s existence, they nevertheless feel eerily like they are not alone in the world.

The first half of the film belongs to Veronika, who visits her sick aunt in Krakow, wins a singing competition, and expires during an impassioned choral performance. The story picks up with Veronique, who we earlier spotted in the Krakow sequence taking pictures of a student demonstration before boarding a French school bus. One of her camera subjects is Veronika, who spies her double through the bus windows as it pulls away.

The Parisian section is where things begin to get perfumey and vapid. Veronique, feeling an inexplicable grief, gives up her singing career and eventually takes up with a lugubrious puppeteer (Philippe Volter) and writer of children’s books who seduces her by sending her cryptic audiotapes and bits of string. It’s like “Lili” meets “The Twilight Zone.” Throughout the film Kieslowski works up little metaphysical tidbits and fancy-pants dualities--both girls possess a star-filled crystal, check into hotel rooms with the same number, and so on--but these moments don’t really resonate; they seem planted, ready to be rooted out by critics eager to puzzle out Kieslowski’s ephemera.

The sense of something beyond one’s life, of someone out there who is paralleling one’s existence, hangs heavy over “The Double Life of Veronique” (Times-rated Mature for explicit sex scenes). But Kieslowski, who has dealt peripherally with some of these themes in “The Decalogue,” has fallen into some bad habits here.

He’s big on portentous anomie, on heavily filtered visuals and extended close-ups of Veronique’s uncomprehending beauty. Jacob won the best actress award last year at Cannes but she doesn’t really give a performance, at least not in the Parisian episode. She poses expressively.

Jacob has a delicate, high-fashion lyricism. There’s something blank in her beauty; it doesn’t yield up new meanings for us, and that’s a significant drawback in a movie that is predicated on the supposed mysteriousness of her features. Jacob reinforces the chic metaphysics at the movie’s core. The reason the film is so reminiscent of fancy parfum commercials is because, like those commercials, it’s all about the allure of surfaces.

Since few current movies are as snazzy as this one, it’s bound to be overrated. Subtitled stylishness is at a premium right now. But Kieslowski hasn’t put himself into this movie--even though the subject of this French-Polish co-production, his first, must touch on his own dualities as an artist. Does he feel split between the Polish Veronika, with her ardent sympathies, and the French Veronique, with her dreamy, free-floating anxieties? When an artist’s national identity breaks up, his artistic identity may be the casualty.

‘The Double Life of Veronique’

Irene Jacob: Veronique/Veronika

Wladyslaw Kowalski: Veronika’s father

Guillaume de Tonquedec: Serge

Philippe Volter Alexandre: Fabbri

A Miramax Films presentation. Director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Producer Leonardo De La Fuente. Screenplay Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak. Production design Patrice Mercier. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (for explicit sex scenes).