Why I Love Irène Jacob’s per­for­mance in The Dou­ble Life of Véronique

A woman cools her­self on a glass win­dow. Her eyes are closed and yet every­thing in that moment is under­stand­able. It is a trans­la­tion of sen­sa­tion into emo­tion. Its grace is in its sim­plic­i­ty but also in its mean­ing being impos­si­ble to ful­ly con­vey in words. The woman is Irène Jacob and she is per­form­ing in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Dou­ble Life of Véronique.

At this point in the film, she is Weroni­ka rather than Véronique, a paired per­for­mance with sub­tle bridges and dif­fer­ences that explores the inex­press­ible com­mu­ni­ca­tion sur­round­ing us on a dai­ly basis. High­ly award­ed at the time, Jacob’s pair of musi­cal char­ac­ters is one of the great feats of Euro­pean screen per­for­mance, a tac­tile and dreamy ren­di­tion of a fan­tas­ti­cal dou­ble haunting.

Kieślowski’s ambigu­ous film opens in Kraków where we see the ear­ly career of a clas­si­cal singer called Weroni­ka (Jacob). She is joy­ful and bois­ter­ous, earn­ing her place in an orches­tra after a chance audi­tion. She con­fides in her aunt (Hali­na Gry­glaszews­ka) about her love life and how she believes she is not alone in the world, con­firmed when she wit­ness­es her­self on a coach of tourists vis­it­ing from France. Weroni­ka dies on stage while per­form­ing, the grief felt across Europe in Paris by her seem­ing dou­ble, Véronique (Jacob).

Véronique is also musi­cal but her life has gone down a dif­fer­ent path. A teacher in a school, she falls in love with a man (Philippe Volter) who per­forms a mar­i­onette show for the chil­dren. A game of clues is played across the city between the two until they even­tu­al­ly meet prop­er­ly. Yet Véronique can­not shake the grief which fol­lows her from the death of anoth­er self some­where afar.

Jacob’s per­for­mance varies beau­ti­ful­ly between these dop­pel­gängers, mar­i­onettes of the direc­tor that take on a life all of their own. Weronika’s grin feels expres­sive of a pos­ses­sion, smil­ing with her teeth but not quite with her eyes. The prox­im­i­ty of her death feels strange­ly fore­told and cap­tured qui­et­ly in moments when alone. The worlds of the two char­ac­ters are con­nect­ed by music, bely­ing the tran­scen­dent qual­i­ties of the emo­tions on dis­play. Jacob expert­ly express­es these word­less feel­ings and moments, often through move­ment and small ges­tures. It gives the film, and its cen­tral dou­ble per­for­mance, the qual­i­ty of a dream.

Véronique in par­tic­u­lar wan­ders as if in a state of sleep, stum­bling and run­ning between the shad­ows of Parisian streets. Mys­tery sur­rounds her as the unname­able grief seeps through the cracks of Jacob’s per­for­mance, grad­u­al­ly becom­ing tor­ren­tial as the emo­tions of the character’s life reach var­i­ous cli­max­es. The long­ing expressed in Jacob’s eyes still weighs on my mind, allow­ing for sim­i­lar­ly mean­der­ing day­dreams about all of our half-for­got­ten moments of déjà vu; those lit­tle glimpses of lives before and after us echo­ing through the min­utes and days.

Jacob’s per­for­mance is also a tac­tile one. Both vari­a­tions of Véronique engage the world through touch, to the point where it is not incon­ceiv­able that the char­ac­ters only ful­ly under­stand things when engag­ing them phys­i­cal­ly, whether they are places or peo­ple. The way her hands move over objects feels strange­ly rit­u­al­is­tic. When she wan­ders the streets, I fol­low the curios­i­ty of her eyes, match­ing it even as the per­for­mance pulls the view­er into con­sid­er­a­tions of every­thing from burned wrecks of cars to emp­ty cafes in Saint-Lazare station.

An aca­d­e­m­ic could label such an approach to per­for­mance as phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal but it would under­mine the warmth and emo­tion­al affect that it results in. Kieślowski’s films are incred­i­bly open to such cold intel­lec­tu­al­i­sa­tion but ulti­mate­ly the per­for­mances and emo­tion­al qual­i­ties he unique­ly draws from his actors are beyond text­book inter­pre­ta­tion. ​“I always sense what I have to do,” sug­gests Véronique. Jacob realis­es this with a tru­ly won­drous gift.

Kieślows­ki gave Jacob space to devel­op each char­ac­ter, insist­ing on her cre­at­ing a set of ges­tures and traits for each woman. ​“I found it a bit strange mak­ing a list of ges­tures,” she said, ​“but it made me think a lot and found a con­crete under­stand­ing about each of these char­ac­ters.” These were from gen­er­al aspects of per­son­al­i­ty to whole move­ments and quirks, ren­der­ing each moment on screen unique and utter­ly of itself.

The Dou­ble Life of Véronique is Jacob’s strongest work because of such detail. Her pain and plea­sure is believ­able as the instant of its arrival is so pre­cise­ly on cam­era rather than just aris­ing as a con­sid­ered fac­sim­i­le. Sen­sa­tions pos­sess every­thing of a life for a time. ​“Dai­ly life is just full of intu­ition and pre­mo­ni­tion,” Jacob said when dis­cussing her inspi­ra­tion for the char­ac­ters, ​“and soli­tude can some­times bring intense moments of fullness.”

The film is filled with her grace in such moments, as if we share for a time in the pres­ence of some­thing holy; the tran­scen­dent of the every­day world that we all under­stand but which is beyond the naïve hope of our lan­guage to convey.