359 The Double Life of Véronique

[John Cope]

Have seen this several times over the years in an effort to develop an appreciation for it. But unfortunately I've never been able to do that. I didn't like it upon its initial release and I still don't like it now. And that does bother me as Kieslowski's ostensible themes, which more or less comprise his subject, do have a lot of interest for me. I guess I've never been a big Kieslowski fan to begin with but that troubled me less in his earlier period. Here (and in the Three Colors Trilogy) it matters to me more that the film matters to me so little and I remained virtually unaffected when it seems I should be the ideal, most receptive audience for what he is doing.

However, at least on this viewing, I do think that I've managed to isolate a bit better what doesn't work for me. And I think it comes down to the overall presentation, the aesthetic for which Kieslowski is otherwise so highly regarded. Obviously this is a beautiful film, among the most beautiful (along with Three Colors again) of its time. But that beauty really is skin deep in this case. It's the quintessence of an aesthetic gloss, though one so highly polished and contributing to such a rarefied presentation that it can hardly be faulted. I realized though, this time around, that a very big part of my resistance comes from what all that is bound up in: specifically, the structuring of the film as metaphysical melodrama. I'd never really realized it before, probably because I respect melodrama a lot in its own right. But here it creates a situation in which everything is too big, broad and bold and all the notes are hit too hard. It's a counterproductive approach, one that doesn't allow for the kind of nuance or irony that these ideas need. If the irony is meant to be located within the metaphysical mystery itself that doesn't work because it's so heavy handed, laid out in block letters, that it becomes stifling, merely a prettified gimmickry. At its best then it can work as a fairy tale for adults, an analogue perhaps to the children's books of the film's puppeteer. But frankly I find that, as with the melodrama form, simply inadequate for what this film purports to be doing or dealing with. Simplicity can be deceptive, of course, as in the case of somebody like Kiarostami but there's nothing here to make me think that about this. To think that in this case, to find profound meaning in it, seems to me to be a running away with the cues (in other words, it becomes more of your own enterprise than that of the film). I'll take Victor Erice over this anyday or, as far as the double motif goes, Figgis's Loss of Sexual Innocence.

One other aspect that I noted: Kieslowski's whole approach/technique ends up emphasizing the image as symbol far more than any potential meaning. This again contributes to a sense of weighty gimmickry. If the symbols do mean more than what is obvious it's an exercise in the vaporous as there is so little substance here to back up a serious exploration of concepts and ideas. Pretentious is a word that I hate and never use but if I was going to ever use it it would be for this.

[Gregory]

Sloper, as always, raises several excellent points, but I just can't relate in the ways discussed in those last two paragraphs, and that's probably the major difference between us. I could suspend my disbelief in the basic premise but when it failed to strike a chord with me, I couldn't continue to do so, and found little of personal interest in it. I also think I may have a general intolerance for most showy films with separate stories that parallel each other and intersect, as they often seem to be caught up in their own structural conceits and delivering impressive visuals, montage, etc. I haven't seen it in 15 years, but Magnolia was, by its second half, like nails on a chalkboard to me for these (and other) reasons, and I could give examples of other films as well. Happenstance was another one I can recall from the same time as Magnolia; no, these coincidences are nowhere near as amazing as the film wants us to believe when it's simply a screenwriter/director connecting a bunch of dots to match up two people, which is not at all how the "butterfly effect" is supposed to work.

The immediately impressive qualities, the glamour, of many of these films can tend to build them up to be more than they ultimately are, at least from my understanding of them. How many viewers would have been so intrigued by the same questions raised in Double Life if the film had been about the lives of two doubles who are both middle-aged Joe Don Baker types—one a bus driver in Jersey City and the other a tow truck driver in Juárez, Mexico—with all the scenes shot in an understated style?
And, for me, that could hypothetically even turn out to be the better film, because it might have forced Kieslowski to dig deeper below the surface.

[Sloper]

Obviously this is a beautiful film, among the most beautiful (along with Three Colors again) of its time. But that beauty really is skin deep in this case. It's the quintessence of an aesthetic gloss, though one so highly polished and contributing to such a rarefied presentation that it can hardly be faulted. I realized though, this time around, that a very big part of my resistance comes from what all that is bound up in: specifically, the structuring of the film as metaphysical melodrama. I'd never really realized it before, probably because I respect melodrama a lot in its own right. But here it creates a situation in which everything is too big, broad and bold and all the notes are hit too hard. It's a counterproductive approach, one that doesn't allow for the kind of nuance or irony that these ideas need. If the irony is meant to be located within the metaphysical mystery itself that doesn't work because it's so heavy handed, laid out in block letters, that it becomes stifling, merely a prettified gimmickry. At its best then it can work as a fairy tale for adults, an analogue perhaps to the children's books of the film's puppeteer.

What sort of ideas do you see the film as dealing with - in other words, what do you think it's fundamentally about? Just to be clear, I'm not asking so that I can say 'You're wrong, it's not about that', but because your point seems to be that the film says what it has to say too bluntly, that it spells out its message in block letters, and I'm genuinely interested to know what you think that message is, or in what you think the 'melodrama' consists.

The film, as I see it, is operating through a series of metaphors, but it doesn't at all seem to be spelling out what these metaphors refer to. Indeed, at times they're so fluid and indeterminate that it almost feels wrong to call them metaphors, as they may not signify anything in particular. The repeated 'string' imagery, for instance, is one of the more easily interpretable motifs in the film, and you could say that it generally suggests the idea of 'connections' - the main characters' connection to the world of the senses, to their own heart-rates, to each other, to life itself, to the grave - but looking through all the associations that accumulate around this image, I would find it hard to sum up, in heavy-handed block letters, what that imagery 'means'. I can understand someone thinking that this film is simply a meaningless series of empty symbols, because (as I said above) it’s clearly the sort of film that won’t strike a chord with everyone. But to think that its meaning is obvious seems a little odd.

How many viewers would have been so intrigued by the same questions raised in Double Life if the film had been about the lives of two doubles who are both middle-aged Joe Don Baker types—one a bus driver in Jersey City and the other a tow truck driver in Juárez, Mexico—with all the scenes shot in an understated style? And, for me, that could hypothetically even turn out to be the better film, because it might have forced Kieslowski to dig deeper below the surface.

That actually sounds like a great film...

One thing that’s come through very strongly in this thread so far is the sense that Double Life is defeated by its own ‘prettiness’, that its aesthetic beauty is skin-deep and substitutes for a deeper exploration of the issues at stake. But just as I don’t see the heavy-handed block letters John Cope describes, so I also don’t really see the excessively ‘pretty’ film others seem to be responding to. Yes, this film is noticeably glossier than Kieslowski’s 80s films, and yes, the green/gold haze in which many shots are bathed is very pleasing to the eye. Irène Jacob is also noticeably more beautiful than his earlier protagonists. I also wonder whether Preisner's lush music contributes to this sense of 'prettification'.

But I have to say that while watching the film, I don’t find myself thinking very much about how beautiful it, or its heroines, look. On repeat viewings, I don’t find myself anticipating some moment of great visual beauty, as I would if this were a film by Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Ford, etc. What I anticipate, and experience, are the complex, layered associations triggered by the images, and more specifically by the way they move and are edited together.

As stills, I don't think they would have the same impact: for instance, the cover of the Criterion edition looks lovely, but weirdly it doesn't seem to resemble the scene from which it's taken, which is actually quite stark and gritty; the closest this film gets to the aesthetic of A Short Film About Killing. On the cover, the heroine looks as though she's having a tranquil, spiritual epiphany. In the film itself, she's having a heart attack, and is about to get flashed by some random bloke.

With this film, I always feel that I’m engaging primarily with something beneath the surface, and like the film is constantly directing me beyond and away from that surface – an effect that is reminiscent of Dreyer, even though Kieslowski and Dreyer are very different in a lot of ways.

Take the concert, for instance: the images and camera movements in that sequence are not in themselves particularly beautiful, and would mean very little if they were excerpted and seen out of context. Their enormous power derives from the way in which they evoke the sense (which we experience in an amazingly vivid first-person mode) of a life-span pulled taut, reaching its climax, falling with an un-dignified thud to the floor, and then quite skittishly, even gracelessly, flying from the body over the heads of the audience. Then we see the burial, and again there’s nothing aesthetically pleasing about this. There’s something horribly matter-of-fact in the way the mourners throw dirt onto the coffin, as if Weronika’s death were not even that much of a shock, or a loss, to them. Of course she’s dead. As her aunt hinted a few minutes earlier, this is how people in this family tend to die. And the clods thudding against the coffin seem to echo, relentlessly, into eternity.

I find it hard to see anything ‘prettified’ in this, and the rather chilling, down-to-earth mood of such scenes pervades the rest of the film, even when it appears to enter a lighter vein, or to be gesturing towards the possibility of some beautiful, mystical higher realm, or to be indulging more in pictorial beauty. That beauty, like Jacob’s, is only there so that the film can get us beyond it. By the end, you need to have ‘got over’ how beautiful the heroine is, and see her as she sees herself: lost, vulnerable, dying, decaying. The fact that others are infatuated with her should mean to us what it means to her: that they have no real sense of who she is.

Put it this way: by the time I reach the final scenes, I find it so easy to identify with this character that she might as well be a crusty Joe Don Baker-type. The fact that she is initially presented as an inaccessibly beautiful woman makes this effect more powerful – not to mention that Kieslowski had already spent a lot of time achieving similar effects with less photogenic people in the Dekalog.

[oh yeah]

More and more I find that my favorite films tend to be ones that don't lend themselves well to rational analysis -- or, in any case, I'm unable to summon up a very coherent and persuasive defense of them to those more skeptical. These tend to be films which are more about mood, atmosphere, feeling, image, sound, and other abstract qualities, than they are about being a conventional narrative-delivering machine that's easy to sum up in a sentence or two.

So, why do I like The Double Life of Veronique so much? Does it make me sound like a solipsistic aesthete when I say that I love it because of the hermetic, unique mood it conjures: an eternally late-afternoon autumn day, cast in green and gold and yellow and amber, as if frozen in time; a gorgeous yet uncanny and oddly haunting apotheosis of cinema as daydream, as reverie. Everybody in this film moves like flies through molasses, a totally constructed world of marionettes being manipulated for the camera. We seem to be seeing things through some enchanted prism, making the mundane and banal appear transcendental (this is one of the great achievements of Kieslowski here as in his greatest film, Rouge). Very little seems spontaneous about the film, yet it conveys so much life and passion and beauty via the aforementioned autumnal gleam of its images as well as the sensually musical, rhythmic tempo to the cutting and pacing of scenes, which, again, recalls a long-lost daydream or memory with its languid melancholy. If a film can show us a splash of green across the face of a young woman, or a cloud of dust appearing at the striking of a rubber ball on a ceiling, and these simple images can have as strong an affect on us as any climactic melodramatic set-piece, then are we talking about pure style with no substance, or rather a substance that relies for its affective power on a play of the various enchanting surfaces that comprise it? Veronique is a very beautiful film, but it never struck me as akin to a fashion advert or something because the beauty is very much tied to specific threads and themes and feelings.

[John Cope]

Obviously this is a beautiful film, among the most beautiful (along with Three Colors again) of its time. But that beauty really is skin deep in this case. It's the quintessence of an aesthetic gloss, though one so highly polished and contributing to such a rarefied presentation that it can hardly be faulted. I realized though, this time around, that a very big part of my resistance comes from what all that is bound up in: specifically, the structuring of the film as metaphysical melodrama. I'd never really realized it before, probably because I respect melodrama a lot in its own right. But here it creates a situation in which everything is too big, broad and bold and all the notes are hit too hard. It's a counterproductive approach, one that doesn't allow for the kind of nuance or irony that these ideas need. If the irony is meant to be located within the metaphysical mystery itself that doesn't work because it's so heavy handed, laid out in block letters, that it becomes stifling, merely a prettified gimmickry. At its best then it can work as a fairy tale for adults, an analogue perhaps to the children's books of the film's puppeteer.

What sort of ideas do you see the film as dealing with - in other words, what do you think it's fundamentally about? Just to be clear, I'm not asking so that I can say 'You're wrong, it's not about that', but because your point seems to be that the film says what it has to say too bluntly, that it spells out its message in block letters, and I'm genuinely interested to know what you think that message is, or in what you think the 'melodrama' consists.

The film, as I see it, is operating through a series of metaphors, but it doesn't at all seem to be spelling out what these metaphors refer to. Indeed, at times they're so fluid and indeterminate that it almost feels wrong to call them metaphors, as they may not signify anything in particular. The repeated 'string' imagery, for instance, is one of the more easily interpretable motifs in the film, and you could say that it generally suggests the idea of 'connections' - the main characters' connection to the world of the senses, to their own heart-rates, to each other, to life itself, to the grave - but looking through all the associations that accumulate around this image, I would find it hard to sum up, in heavy-handed block letters, what that imagery 'means'. I can understand someone thinking that this film is simply a meaningless series of empty symbols, because (as I said above) it’s clearly the sort of film that won’t strike a chord with everyone. But to think that its meaning is obvious seems a little odd.

I'm sorry, I guess I really wasn't clear enough. I agree with you 100% that the film does not spell out its metaphors' meanings. And I agree that they are not even always clearly metaphors, though I would be less generous in calling them "fluid and indeterminate" and instead call them "vaporous". For me they are more purely direct signifiers and the film is replete with them and it is to that I meant to refer when I talked about the heavy handed laying-things-out quality of the picture. In melodrama that would not generally bother me but it does here as the melodrama is tied in to what I consider a pretty fatuous and fast-and-loose use of those signifiers, exactly because they are so "indeterminate". To put it simply, it feels like a relentless onslaught of all too overt symbolism for its own sake. It can all mean something certainly but the onus is almost entirely upon us to follow up on that because Kieslowski comes off as far more interested in the constant foregrounding of these signifiers than in any meaning at all and I for one just don't find much in the way of substantive support to back up a particularly rich or engaging reading (though I will certainly say that your reading of the film is as rich and engaging as any I have yet seen). At its best it seems the sort of film that provides a good impetus and direction for creative and imaginative interpretation via its foundational framework (as in, say, Zizek's read). It allows for much and there's nothing wrong with that except that for me it is simply far more reliant, too excessively reliant, upon the interpreter than the artist.

[therewillbeblus]

This is a favorite that I've never tried to analyze because it seems to best exist as a poetic symphony of spiritual sensations, but after a couple sequential revisits I feel like I have a broad reading of how it moves me, at least today. The film appears to be 'about' how engaging with the invisible spiritual elements, pervasively existing around us, allows for deeper corporeal engagement. It seems to be about how we oscillate between feeling connected and disconnected to our world. However, it's to the film's credit that there are no clear markers for what is 'optimal behavior' (nor does it equate this progress with 'satisfaction'). Rather (and this is very personally rooted to what I define a higher power, or 'God' as), there are ubiquitous opportunities to connect, always occurring in our peripheries, if we choose to get outside of 'self' to notice them.

Weronique has a clear spiritual connection in the opening moment of singing in the rain, but then she fearfully isolates herself from a lover. He tries to engage her in asking about her finger, a clear signal of seeking intimacy in all the imperfections of someone we love, but she's embarrassed about a trivial deformity and recounts a vague story of the circumstances. The response is very fact-driven: 'Caught in a car door. After exams.' Weronique is consumed with self, stuck in solipsistic inertia, without leaving space for the spiritual (i.e. Faith in her partner accepting her? Taking a risk with intimacy?) that would bring her deeper into corporeal harmony. Instead, she's disconnecting herself from opportunities. She plays with the string anxiously as a coping mechanism with her fingers as she responds to him leaning in with avoidance. Conversely, later on Veronique uses the string in ways that transcend self-regulation. At one point, she places it above the notes of a music sheet, repurposing it for something less tactile or defined, but abstract and meaningful. Weronique feels the physical string, and Veronique feels the energy of whatever the string might represent to her, like the enigmatic but still powerfully tangible energy of music.

There's also something poetic at how the the string hovers above the musical notes on the page, as two sequences in parallel harmony, except one is ingrained in paper and following a known logic and the other is disconnected from the paper and its significance is unknowable, or adaptable for interpretation. The music can represent the corporeal information we know and can predict, while the string is the spiritual - existing outside of a defined parameter but accessible in ways we wish to access and make meaning from it. That's one way to define God.

Weronique and Veronique both connect with pretty objects and feel the spiritual effects of them. They both have a spiritual relationship with music. Weronique notices her double but does not have the same opportunities Veronique has to access the spiritual. Does Veronique only begin to engage with the world this way once Weronique dies? Yes and no*. We don't know her before the incident occurs, but something she says later in the film suggests the latter. But it's indisputable that Weronique's death has an effect on her, so it's worth exploring the 'Yes' side first. And for the purpose of this path, as far as the death goes, I guess I see this far more allegorical than the film's events present themselves: That we evolve throughout our lives, and a former self of us 'dies' in order to allow the birth of a new stage towards self-actualization.

In one sense, Veronique feels this 'loss', which disrupts the complacency of a corporeal existence. I don't see her leaving music behind as a fear-based exit to avoid death, as others have proposed (though I'm not saying that's a 'wrong' interpretation), but she may feel compelled to 'do things differently'. Perhaps she doesn't possess the skills yet to determine what that might look like on a case-by-case basis (not yet self-actualized yet, and only realizing this having been disrupted from an existence she probably believed was fully matured), so she begins by disconnecting from her routine in order to 'find'. It's through feeling an absence of connection following Weronique's death, that Veronique can tune into the mystery in order to more comfortably discover herself. She becomes more sensitive to small details signifying something nebulous, and encourages peculiar clues to help her connect to the spiritual realm. Her initial disquieting sensation reminded me of similar stages of my life when I suddenly was thrust out of an ignorant Sisyphean state, and felt very isolated, only to eventually lean into the margins and crevices of the world around me that I had never explored in order to feel connected again. Veronique humbles herself, and that stance opens doors.

I'm not sure what role the puppeteer plays, but I'm not sure how much it matters. He's a figure Veronique is engaging with who she may have otherwise ignored, and in the process she discovers both a bounty of 'information' and nothing at all. He serves as a vehicle for her to experiment with the practice of willingness and acclimating to the comfort with 'not-fully-knowing' truth. I like to think of him as a device that represents all the 'unknown' aspects of our world, which takes on a kind of spiritual quality until we gain knowledge, when they become corporeal. Once the cryptic and exciting games arrive at a sit-down cafe conversation, he cites an obsession with the 'possible' that seems counterintuitive to the film's ethos: A controlled, willful, narcissistic, self-obsessed closed experiment, in contrast to Veronique's spiritual quest of openness to 'possibility'. She becomes upset and leaves the table, but then looks at him through the glass. He blows his nose, demonstrating himself to be human, not a supernatural godlike figure she's gravitating towards, and she smiles. She smiles at the imperfections that Weronique covered up with her lover early on. And then her smile fades into something inexplicable. Disappointment? A numbness as the high fades and reality sets in? A new revelation?

Does his vehicle depress her in a negative way or actually help by sobering her to limitations, diffusing the fantastical pink-cloud she's been on, accruing comfort? With spiritual growth, we often receive reminders of the nonlinearity of development, and of the corporeal's gravity that keeps us from spiritual omnipotence... Is he a walking parable, concluding that once a mystery is given a rationale, it ceases to be special?

Not all is as it might seem though, and the final scenes give a lot to chew on that disrupt this reading and make room for something more inclusive and complex. After they meet again, the puppeteer renounces his earlier explanation of an introverted experiment, perhaps as an intentional God-moment of provocation forcing Veronique out of her fantasy-world, or maybe just a self-conscious avoidance technique like Weronique issued in bed with her lover at the start, to protect from vulnerability. They exchange 'I love you's and talk about their mutual confidence in an affinity around a collective 'sense' rather than independent logics. They don't 'know' the corporeal information about each other, but they feel something spiritual between them, and they seek to find out those answers: 'To allow the spiritual to bring us back to deeper corporeal engagement', where these oft-banal bits of information can become infinitely special, and grace can be found in physical conditions.

*This is where the answer to the earlier question 'Does Veronique only begin to engage with the world this way once Weronique dies?' shifts. Veronique tells the puppeteer, "I always know what I should do" though she can't explain it. Has Weronique's essence always been a preceding energy for Veronique to respond to, allegorically how past versions of ourselves inform our current self's behaviors? Either way, she's content with the mystery. But once she sees the photograph and the mystery becomes palpable in both familiar (tangible evidence) and unfamiliar ("That's not my coat") terms, it destroys the personalized version of her self-diagnosed superpower of a sixth-sense and her connection to the celestial world. Yet this also recontextualizes everything that came before. If her comfort was always in this safe form of half-spiritual engagement, was that her version of complacency? It would make sense that this is different from Weronique's corporeal complacency, since she ostensibly didn't have a double self to come before her to securely inform her behavior (if she had, maybe she wouldn't have ignored warning signs of poor health). So this intrusion of the photograph may send Veronique into an uncomfortable crisis, but it also liberates her further from an ingrained schematic perspective of how she engages with the world, triggering a painful rebirth.

I'm not sure if she feels connected to him when they make love, or if she's upset by the picture of Weronique and reliving that experience of disconnection all over again, but I think it's a tremendously ambiguous scene for layering both situations on top of one another: physical corporeal connection with spiritual disconnection; or reversed, physical corporeal disconnection with spiritual connection. I don't think a cognitive connection is clear in this moment even for Veronique, but the emotions she feels in response are lucidly-felt, and this complex sensation without a concrete 'evolution' from X to Y is as honest as Kieslowski can direct the experience. Social-emotional progress isn't linear, and even though Veronique has been moving in the 'right' direction, that doesn't mean that her corporeal-spiritual relationship will become crystalized in one direction forever without ever getting muddled. Self-actualization isn't finite, and it doesn't necessitate absolute comfort or happiness - just a greater sense of 'acceptance'.

I believe this experience of lovemaking/looking at the picture is partially dysphoric and partially euphoric, but it moves the needle towards accepting her limitations to actually 'discover' a pronounced and finalized version of what 'is', a humility that she cannot be god. It's both tragic and liberating, and allows her to become a realistically-compromised version of butterfly like the ballerina in the puppeteer's story. With acceptance, she can reconnect with the corporeal in infinite ways within these restricted terms, rather than avoiding the acknowledgement of them or fighting them, as Weronique did at times, and it seems Veronique did in her own way.

So what of the title? How is Veronique living a double life? Obviously there's the literal interpretation that they are doubles and influencing one another's lives, or rather that Weronique's spirit disrupts Veronique's composure and incites an expansive existential experience. It's this latter interpretation that seems to give the title a more nuanced meaning: That Veronique is split between corporeal and spiritual involvement. The first part of the film demonstrates a milder version of this (since we are all inherently subject to spiritual variables, regardless of how consciously involved we are), and the bulk of the narrative centers around a more acute episode of active participation before a surrender with the tree. But aren't we all living a double life, similar to her's? Aren't we all struggling with how small we feel in the scope of the universe, how impotent we are to be intrinsically blind to a spiritual realm, and also comforted by this lack of responsibility and knowledge and embrace of 'possibility' that would be extinguished if we did know? Aren't we all ignoring so many corporeal possibilities in our peripheries, and also noticing some and placing so much value on them that gives us authentic emotional experiences, informing a confidence that our lives are worth living?

The puppeteer seems to embody the ambiguity of both a spiritual and corporeal force. He's obscure and prompts multiple, conflicting emotional experiences, much like a human's relationship to a higher power... or another human being! His actions could be seen as educational or faltering attempts to engage on a human level of compassion. Does the burn story signify something real, or is it just a reason to give for why we have 'instinct', and to what end? Is it meant to be comforting, or in providing something clear, is it helpful in forcing Veronique to reckon with the discomfort in the corporeal? Does Veronique's skepticism to both absolutist spiritual and corporeal rationales handicap her, or set her free into the grey space that comes next?

He attempts to comfort her with coerced corporeal engagement in sex, but it doesn't solve the problem. Are they even connected here, or disconnected completely on what they want out of the relationship? Can we view his writing of the book as a tribute to all that matters: Their connection, 'knowing' her as much as anyone can? Or is it a foreboding summation of her messy relationship with her self and the world around her, a deflation of her ignorance to help her surrender to a tragic fate, or alleviate the self-constructed barriers to help her connect deeper with her world outside of some introverted sixth-sense? Is the touching of the tree actually a desperate gesture to find acceptance and connect to the world? Does it signal the beginning of a new stage of life, and is she perhaps leaving this life behind to start anew, just like she left music at the start of the past transformation? Is her father, feeling connected to her, feeling his own sense of loss, and thus being forced into a new stage of his own? That final moment exhibits so much enigmatic connection, that even if there is a tragedy contained within it, I can't help but lean in and feel connected too. Whether we want to or not, no matter how alone we feel, and in some ways objectively 'are', we also cannot evade the spiritual harmony that exists between us and the people we love, are attracted to, and cross paths with in this mysterious world.

Edit (2/4/24): Coming at it a bit more simply: This is a story of aging through youth and into adulthood. Veronique feels she has a sixth sense while there's a double around; maybe not one she can see or consciously knows is there - but she feels her and feels a 'part of' rather than alone. When that double dies, the abstract comfort of a higher power whose warmth allowed Veronique to bask in complacent contentment, Veronique's bubble is burst and she will never return to that cocoon again. But while that's a painful loss, there's a lot to be gained. At the end of the film, she touches a tree - a physical thing. No longer is she stably satisfied, blindly trusting all her security on an imaginary energy-friend, but that acute consciousness to reality spawns new opportunities. She's conscientiously and desperately and passionately and with surrender - all of these, or maybe less, or maybe more - making contact with nature, not an abstract energy but a physical signifier to make meaning out of. There's something very sad about the lack of returned reassurance or reciprocal cradling, but it would be a false promise - and so it's also a reassuring exhibition of resilience, gratitude, and connection on life's terms. And I do believe this reading holds, regardless of where you think she's heading to next