Know The Score: Tamar-kali on The Dou­ble Life of Veronique

The Dou­ble Life of Veronique is a film about dop­pel­gängers and the idea that some­where right now there could well be some­one who looks just like you yet lives a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent life.

Weroni­ka and Véronique, two young women liv­ing in Poland and France (both played by Irène Jacob), are both singers, the same age, and iden­ti­cal in appear­ance. But although they are unaware of each other’s exis­tence, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1991 film con­jures up a mag­net­ic ener­gy that sug­gests the uni­verse is some­how try­ing to pull their souls together.

A med­i­ta­tion on the mean­ing of life and what it takes to tru­ly find your­self, the film is held togeth­er by its oper­at­ic score which, despite being root­ed in max­i­mal­ist com­po­si­tions, man­ages to be both still and intro­spec­tive. Zbig­niew Preis­ner, who worked with Kieślows­ki through­out the late director’s career, uses haunt­ing flute solos that sound like cries from beyond the ether. His reliance on eerie minor chord changes and dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions on the same cen­tral theme also tap into the exis­ten­tial mys­tery that dri­ves the story.

Singer-song­writer and ris­ing film com­pos­er Tamar-kali dis­cov­ered Preisner’s score by acci­dent while brows­ing YouTube, but the Brook­lyn native knew almost instant­ly she had found some­thing spe­cial. ​“I found the ​‘Les Mar­i­on­nettes’ song that plays dur­ing the film’s pup­pet sequence and was just blown away by its ethe­re­al beau­ty,” she tells LWLies.

“The key changes are gor­geous but also so melan­cholic. It’s rare that you hear music and can tell instant­ly that it was played direct­ly from a composer’s heart, but it felt like Preis­ner real­ly was giv­ing us a win­dow into his soul and chan­nelling some of that pain he must have felt hav­ing grown up under Sovi­et rule. I was reeled in completely.”

The musi­cian is a ris­ing star in the film world, hav­ing pro­vid­ed the score for Dee Rees’ his­tor­i­cal dra­ma Mud­bound, a com­po­si­tion that shares The Dou­ble Life of Veronique’s love for naked­ly bru­tal strings and unex­pect­ed shifts in tone. Indeed, Tamar-kali says that Preis­ner had a direct impact on the way that she approach­es film music.

“For me, I hear things in my head, but write music from my heart,” she explains. ​“On some lev­el, I would say that’s inspired by Preisner’s work on this film. He knows how to do all these acro­bat­ic acts with the instru­men­ta­tion, but he also knows how to play just one note that fuck­ing crush­es you. It is music built around emo­tion and feel­ing, and that’s ulti­mate­ly where I try to exist as an artist.”

Tamar-kali recent­ly col­lab­o­rat­ed again with Rees, scor­ing the polit­i­cal thriller The Last Thing He Want­ed. She’s also cur­rent­ly work­ing on a new solo album. How­ev­er, with 94 per cent of the top 250 films at the domes­tic box office in 2018 using male com­posers, accord­ing to the Cen­ter for the Study of Women in Tele­vi­sion and Film, Tamar-kali says she’s also moti­vat­ed in mov­ing the con­ver­sa­tion around gen­der equal­i­ty to some­where more substantial.

“I’m try­ing to change things as much as I can. Sad­ly, we like to go through phas­es of talk­ing about gen­der inequal­i­ty but are shy about mak­ing defin­i­tive changes. Peo­ple are so unfa­mil­iar with how sys­temic oppres­sion works that progress for the aver­age per­son is just an anec­do­tal expe­ri­ence, or token as it were. We need to get past the anec­do­tal debate and start mea­sur­ing suc­cess on actions rather than words. The bot­tom line is that more women need to be scor­ing movies!”

Tamar-kali says the Dou­ble Life of Veronique has aged so well is because it poet­i­cal­ly touch­es on the idea that human beings all have unan­swered ques­tions that they hold onto. And she believes the fact the film is dri­ven by such an abstract sto­ry, which is com­plete­ly open to inter­pre­ta­tion, makes it all the more impres­sive that Preisner’s score still man­ages to be so powerful.

“The hard­est thing about work­ing with a direc­tor is when they ask you to cre­ate a sound that they are unable to artic­u­late. The Dou­ble Life of Veronique is a film about life being unre­solved and hav­ing all this mys­tery, so the fact Preis­ner was able to so per­fect­ly dial into this com­plex world is all the more impressive.

“It’s a film about the banal­i­ties of every­day life and fea­tures lots of com­ings and goings, but there’s this unan­swered ques­tion that dri­ves the two char­ac­ters while the haunt­ing choral pieces that light up all of their scenes have this oth­er­world­ly vibra­tion. Preis­ner presents very every­day sounds, but under­pins them with this super­nat­ur­al mys­tery. The music leaves you with the open­ness of pos­si­bil­i­ty. It makes you want to believe in mir­a­cles, and that’s a very hard thing for a com­pos­er to achieve.”