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Titolo: New Yorker su Kieslowski

Ho tolto la seconda parte dell'articolo che non riguardava il regista 
polacco...
SOUL MATES
"The Double Life of Véronique,"  "Lucky Number Slevin."
by ANTHONY LANE
Issue of 2006-04-10
Posted 2006-04-03
Do movies grow old? They may physically fade, as the film stock 
decays; they may look dated, as the trappings, or the actorly 
mannerisms, of a former age become more glaring; but what of the 
feelings that they generate, or the gestures that they sought to 
enshrine? These questions crowded in as I watched "The Double Life of 
Véronique," a film that held me in a discomforting trance when I saw 
it, and resaw it, on its first appearance, in 1991. Now it is back, as 
part of the Krzysztof Kies'lowski season at Lincoln Center, running 
from April 5th through April 23rd. The retrospective includes early 
shorts and rare documentaries, and all Kies'lowski fans will have their 
touchstones; some will bow before his noble "Three Colors" trilogy, 
completed two years before his death, in 1996, while purists will 
insist on the supremacy of the "Decalogue," a series of films rooted 
in the Ten Commandments. Novices, however, might care to begin with 
mid-career puzzlers such as "No End" or "Blind Chance," or, better 
still, to dive into "Véronique."
The film stars Irène Jacob, first as Veronika, a student in Kraków, 
and then as Véronique, a music teacher in the French city of 
Clermont-Ferrand. The women are unrelated and unknown to one another, 
but they are identical, and, at one miraculous instant, they are 
separated by a matter of yards. In short, they are soul mates. You can 
only hope to film such a subject if you believe in the existence of 
the soul, but Kies'lowski goes one better: he acts as the flight 
controller of the soul. Poor, enraptured Veronika, singing onstage 
with an orchestra, expires in the middle of a phrase---literally dying 
for her art---and the camera passes serenely over the heads of the 
audience, charting her departure from this life. We even get a shot 
from within her grave, watching and hearing the earth being tossed 
down by mourners; it is a fright worthy of Poe, although he might have 
fainted at what follows---a straight cut to the living Véronique, 
nearing orgasm in the arms of a lover. The great death has led to a 
little one, and from here on she will be haunted (though more consoled 
than spooked) by her other half.
Fans of the director praise his metaphysical powers, but that claim, 
in any filmmaker, is to be approached with caution. The sole reason 
that Kies'lowski, like Bergman, has earned the right to offer us 
glances into the beyond is that his grip on the here and now is so 
unerring; witness Veronika's scraping of dead leaves along the top of 
a wall, the splash of her shoes in a sun-flashing puddle, the trailing 
end of Véronique's scarf in a hospital corridor, and the closing shot 
of her palm on the bark---the reliable roughness---of a tree. As you watch 
the golden flutter of light that darts around Véronique's room, you 
might reasonably wonder if Kies'lowski was schooled in metempsychosis, 
or spiritual transmigration, but you could also ask whether, as a boy, 
he had listened to tales of Tinkerbell. The film is filled to dazzling 
with the vitreous and the translucent; the flaw running down the 
window of a Polish train seems, in some mystifying way, as momentous 
as a rift in space-time. We see through a glass darkly, and often 
confusingly, but at least we see.
So has this vision worn well? It seems more politically suffused; 
fifteen years ago, I was too dumbfounded, or too plain dumb, to 
realize that the very idea of the movie's transit between Western and 
Eastern Europe was a declaration of newly acquired liberty. There is a 
clue in a postmark on an envelope that Véronique inspects with a 
magnifying glass: "1990," it reads, the year in which the Communist 
Party of Poland was finally dissolved. The bodies of its citizens, as 
well as the souls of its singers, were henceforth free to travel where 
they desired. Could it be that our two, mirrored heroines were the 
product of a divided continent, and that, with the melting of borders, 
only one of them was now required?
Then, there is Irène Jacob. Time has not weakened my worship, but I 
did start to question, this time round, how skilled an actress she 
actually was. The picture is unthinkable without her presence---swaying 
between the jubilant and the fretful, all wide eyes and corrugated 
brow. It is as if she lacked a layer of skin, and that rawness verges 
on the embarrassing; she comes across not as a decided character but 
as somebody to whom things happen---a perfect alabaster form, still 
taking blows from the sculptor's chisel. When Véronique sits with her 
young pupils, watching a puppet show, she responds with the same 
ecstatic naïveté as they do. She is frequently naked, but her face, in 
arousal, could be that of a saint, lost in religious contemplation, 
and her bare breast is also the clothed breast that she instinctively 
cups, mid-song, as if striving to hold her heart in. Kies'lowski was 
brilliant with children and with the elderly, who, lacking the 
strength for defiance, tend to submit to the imprint of fate; could 
decades of totalitarian rule have attuned him almost too well to the 
spectacle of human beings being jerked around by the puppeteers of the 
state? Where are the robust resisters of middle age?
Near the start of the film, Veronika turns to her father with a plea: 
"What do I really want, Papa?" To Western ears, especially those of 
American youth, that will sound comically passive, yet we live with 
such a plethora of wants, with such high expectations that they will 
be met, and with such a barrage of complaints if they are not, that to 
find a director filing reports from a world of uncertainty has a 
strangely tonic effect. The two leads in "The Double Life of 
Véronique" may annoy us, but whatever it is they suffer 
from---loneliness, diminished civil rights, an impoverishment of the 
will---has forced them to clutch at those scraps of bliss which life can 
unexpectedly let fall. If you wish to prime yourself for two and a 
half weeks at Lincoln Center, try consulting Kies'lowski's 
fellow-Poles: not just film-makers but poets, too, so many of them 
expert in that wry delight. All of Veronika, and Véronique, is 
prefigured in these lines of Czeslaw Milosz:
O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of
movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
-- 
http://bax.blogspot.com/
"Basta fatti, vogliamo promesse."
www.iaciners.org

 "The Double Life of Véronique,"  "Lucky Number Slevin."
Me lo sono letto tutto pensando di trovare una connessione... ma Lucky
Number Slevin, che ci azzecca?
-- 
www.iaciners.org
Trisha: I wanted to thank you for the beautiful drawing you did of me.
[Through gritted teeth]
Trisha: It's hanging in my *bedroom*.
Napoleon Dynamite: Really? It took me like three hours to finish the
shading on your upper lip. It's probably the best drawing I've ever done.

 
Penso siano due titoli di due rassegne che stanno facendo, io mi sono 
fermato a Kieslowski perche' l'altro non mi interessava. Comunque 
l'articolo intero e' sul New Yorker online.
ciao,
bax
