I see a woman. She's walking in the late afternoon amber-green light of a college town. She makes films. She's lived in New York and Chicago. She's traveled all over the world. She wears her hair long. This woman is me. This is the me who finished college and went on to build a life of her own. I sense her every so often, an uncanny feeling where I'm certain she exists in the material plane.
Right at this moment she is walking to keep an appointment. It's a film resistant to pinning down, slippery and sensuous as water in its images. But its text is a thrilling, numinous reading of how the choices we make, and paths we don't go down, can literally haunt us as specters of lives not lived. She unknowingly takes a photo of her Polish double Weronika also Jacob. Weronika prepares for an important debut as a singer. As she opens her mouth to sing, she collapses and dies from a heart condition.
At that moment Veronique strangely finds herself in tears after sex with her current lover. She tries to explain to her partner that she just had the sense of suddenly being all alone in the world.
That existential ache, of losing a part you didn't know you needed, hangs over the rest of the film. The man she thinks she loves views her as raw material for the stories he creates. She won't find that missing piece in him. And she won't find that grand golden thread that connects everything and everyone and reveals the great pattern behind the universe. Life remains frustratingly elusive in its meaning.
It's easy to read the political shadings of the film. In the newly reunited Europe a protest in a square in Warsaw is cause for a fluttering of tourists taking photos instead of fear.
