“The Double Life of Veronique” over my Tango Baby
I do not know what sense there is in keeping this movie journal or what it can possibly add to The Checkout.
As I watch this fragile movie online – “The Double Life of Veronique” – I watch my Tango Baby, asleep, her womb bursting with my baby. One is like the other.
If I should go, who will watch over Tango Baby for me? The Hunched Cornish will kill her. He will kill the baby. I have to do everything I can to stop him. But what? Lay down my life? Will this be enough to frustrate his will, his depraved ambitions; will it be enough to stop his relentless motion forward? And what of this fear? Yet, we all have to die – so what is there to be afraid of? I have already learned to take hope from words – mere words – without knowing, that there is no death, as Lucy of “Lucy” said. There is ever only a continuation in changing form of what has been; a new beginning is always wrought from every end.
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
Words spoken by a man suffering desperate loneliness in a world of silence – a silence shared with a mentally unhinged woman who terrorizes the man with her incessant tyrannical hectoring; otherwise, the two have nothing meaningful to say to each other, making the creeping insanity of the loneliness even more desperate, even more palpable.
Words spoken by Charlton Heston in the science fiction cult classic, “The Omega Man,” based on the Richard Matheson novel “I am Legend.” Heston is quoting from “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot. The quote is from the section of the poem called ‘A Game of Chess.’
Heston speaks the words to a woman in his apartment who is among a handful of people who did not yet succumb to a deadly plague brought on by biological warfare some years earlier that wiped out most of humanity. All other survivors have become zombie-like mutants out to destroy Heston and the last remnants of the humanity he represents with all its civilization and science. Heston is a scientist who has managed to immunize himself against the plague with an experimental vaccine. He thinks he can develop a serum from his own blood to help the other survivors, like the woman, who have not yet succumbed.
Heston is a prisoner from the mutants in his own apartment. In the apartment, he plays a perpetual game of chess with a mannequin, who represents his old self, and who answers Heston from time to time, something like a low-level robot of Heston’s own inventing, with pre-recorded replies. Heston is, of course, playing the game of chess with himself.
The found woman comes as a huge psychological relief, and long-pent-up sexual release. Unlike the couple in the Eliot poem, Heston’s relationship with the woman, though short, is happy and sane. They build the relationship and hold up hope for the future.
Yet the terrible prophecy of Eliot’s words surrounds them.
Yet, what is this to me? Does everything have to be connected?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
In “The Double Life of Veronique,” a 1991 French and Polish-language drama directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski, the first Veronique, the Polish Weronika, who possesses a strong and hauntingly beautiful soprano voice, only gets about a half-hour of screen time, and then she dies.
A choir director notes her voice and gives her a lead part for the performance of an oratorio in Krakow.
We are given a Krakow, and a Poland, in the midst of swirling protest rallies presaging the collapse of the country’s communist regime amid fears whether the new Poland will be born.
Weronika represents this new Poland. When she sings, she becomes suffused in a self-emanated radiance made of a pure love for the gift in her life, and her life in the gift. When she gives up her voice to her utmost in an act of otherworldly love, beauty, and ecstasy, emotion overwhelms her to the point where she puts the body, much frailer than the voice it contains, at risk.
During her concert performance, as she builds to a moving and vocally demanding solo passage, her heart gives out from the emotional strain and she collapses dead on stage, her spirit rising out of her and passing over the bewildered members of the audience. We are also bewildered: A beautiful life, a beautiful girl, pure of heart, happy, savoring experience, exploring life, life shown in its living as a good and wonderful thing, as sacred, in love with a young man, a musical career just getting started, the lifetime’s chance given to dedicate her voice, an entire future to look forward to, cut down, not even in her prime.
She had given her life for her art. Like Poland, her body was fragile, and her death on stage – the world stage – was the dramatization and expression of the fear that the fragile body of Poland would not be able to give birth to the extraordinary beauty buried within it, but would die in the trying.
It is therefore appropriate that this Weronika is given such a short time on Earth, even if we are angered and saddened.
We are then given Weronika’s wished-for life in her double, the Parisian Veronique, and Poland’s wished-for life in its symbolic double – France – the kind of great Western country Poland longs to be.
Like Weronika, this Veronique is also musical, and teaches a music class to children. But her gift is not as great, and she is not as emotionally intense or given over to her art. She is clearly more secure in her life, and more laid back, taking for granted what she is comfortable with and never questioning whether or not it should be there. It just is. While this condition – freedom – might have curbed the intensity of her devotion to music, thereby limiting her development in this art, it has allowed her to more fully explore and live the experiences of all life itself, without sublimating them into one esoteric pursuit, as true with her sad and tragic double.
And what of Tango Baby?
“The Double Life of Veronique” ends. And Tango Baby’s asleep. The movie has put Paris in my mind – like I want to be there. There’s a French film festival playing at the Kyiv Cinema across Lev Tolstoy Square. I head out through my skylight to avoid making noise with closing doors.
I’ll only be about two hours. I’d like a break. I need a break. Very much. Tango Baby, I’ll be back.
Manny Face, October 2, 2014