DVD Watch: Potential-Gift Edition

The Double Life of Veronique

Criterion, $39.95

Twelve minutes. The time it takes The Double Life of Veronique to lodge a lump in your throat named Krzysztof Kieslowski. The previous 11 minutes and 59 seconds, beginning on Christmas Eve, has already stolen more than your breath. Ninety-seven minutes, then: the interval between your first and second swim through Veronique's metaphysical rapture. Contrary to Annette Insdorf's equally delicate, precise, idolatrous feature-length commentary, a clear delineation of the film's doppelgängers, Weronika singing heavenward in the director's native Warsaw, and Veronique's seduction by marionette in the Paris of Kieslowski's later Blue, White, and Red trilogy, isn't immediately apparent. Neither that blurred reality nor the film's European ending drives repeat immersions, however – even if collaborators cite 15 to 21 different final versions of Veronique by its chain-smoking visionary. It's Kieslowski. His singular, and, in the words of Insdorf, "deeply poetic brand of cinematic storytelling with rhyming images." More than five hours of rich backstory envelops two discs, including short films, an on-set interview with Kieslowski, and earth angel Irène Jacob. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak's anecdote of the decision to cast the shy, inexperienced Jacob, Ingrid Bergman immaculate and glimpsed briefly only in Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants, wells up more emotion. Krakow's Zbigniew Preisner, who scored 17 Kieslowski films in nine years, also bobs for Adam's apples in honoring his lifelong comrade, who died during what one documentary angrily terms "botched" heart surgery in Poland, 1991.