seen 8th-14th July : The Double Life of Veronique (1991) [7/10]; Harry Potter 5 [6/10]

Published on: July 9th, 2007

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE : [7/10] : La double vie de Véronique : Fr (/Pol/Nor) 91 : Krzysztof KIESLOWSKI : 98 mins (BBFC)
seen at Gala, Durham, 9th July : public show :  £3.20
   Krakow, 1990: Weronika (Irene Jacob, visibly dubbed into Polish) is an attractive, gauche brunette in her early twenties, a music student who dreams of a singing career. One day, passing through a city square in which a political protest is taking place, she notices a tourist bus from Paris. Among the passengers: a young woman who resembles Weronika in almost every regard.
   Weronika lucks her way into a job as a soloist in a classical-music ensemble, but during her very first professional engagement she suffers a coronary attack, collapses, and is declared dead on the spot. The action then moves to Paris, where we come across the French tourist: Véronique (Jacob again), an attractive, slightly gauche brunette in her early twenties…
   Kieszlowski's deliberately-enigmatic, deliberately-lopsided (Weronika gets 30 mins, Veronique an hour) meditation on fate and metaphyiscal transcendence was – coming soon after his Dekalog - one of the major Euro-arthouse hits of the early nineties. Sixteen years on, it remains a fascinating, shimmery bauble, a series of disarming, diaphanous epiphanies loosely structured around an intriguingly (and increasingly) opaque excuse for a plot.
   Slawomir Idziak's cinematography is perhaps a little too fond of honey-yellow filters for comfort, and the third-act's (Amelie-prefiguring) prominence of self-satisfied puppeteer/children's-author Alexandre (Philippe Volter) is somewhat counterproductive (especially when he starts spelling out the previously-evanescent connections between Weronika and Véronique). But Jacob's surgingly uninhibited performance is consistently a thing of elemental, mercurial wonder, and the numerous wordless, music-heavy interludes are often shattering in their ecstatic, emotional impact. 14.7.07

HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX : [6/10] : US 07 : David YATES : 138 mins (BBFC)
seen at Empire, Newcastle, 10th July : press show
    The first Potter book (Philosopher's Stone) comprised 309 pages; its screen-adaptation 152 minutes – a 2:1 ratio. This fifth instalment – in which increasingly-hormonal schoolboy-wizard Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) trains up an ad-hoc army to counter the massing forces of his mortal foe Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) – runs to nearly 900 pages, which have been condensed into 138 minutes of screen time: a 6:1 ratio.
    This results in a jawdropping galaxy of acting talent being restricted – with a handful of exceptions – to fleeting cameos (David Thewlis has perhaps one line; Emma Thompson two scenes). It's surely no coincidence that only Alan Rickman – who, after five outings as uber-sardonic Severus Snape, is expert at making very much out of exceedingly little – achieves particular impact ("I - may - vomit") from his fleeting screen-time.
    But – Matthew Lewis's heroically hapless Neville Longbottom notwithstanding – Phoenix is, very much Imelda Staunton's show, as her poisonously-saccharine fuchsia-garbed Ministry-of-Magic apparatchik Dolores Umbridge initiates a Kafka-bureaucratic reign of fear at Hogwarts worthy of Voldemort himself. Indeed, it's befuddlingly surprising when it finally emerges that dastardly Dolores isn't somehow in cahoots with the Dark Lord.
     All too typical of a hectic script that never quite coheres, uses endless newspaper headlines to awkwardly propel the plot along, and occasionally comes across as a kind of Highlander Jr. TV-veteran Yates's direction is, meanwhile, strictly functional – seldom living up to a striking phantasmagoric-suburbia prologue which resembles some Shane Meadows (megabudget) version of H P Lovecraft. 14-17.7.07

H.Potter films previously reviewed on Jigsaw Lounge:
1 Philosopher's Stone (aka Sorcerer's Stone) : 5/10
2 Chamber of Secrets : 4/10
3 Prisoner of Azkaban : 4/10
4 Goblet of Fire : 6/10

Neil Young

NB 
1. all films seen in the UK, and all timings approximate, unless stated otherwise
2. timings taken from the BBFC website are rounded to the nearest minute (i.e. 100min 29sec = 100min, but 100min 30sec = 101min)
3. an asterisk [*] in the rating indicates that film is not a feature (i.e. 0-39m = short; 40m-63m = medium-length; 64m+ = feature)